Business intelligence, intelligent content and devices, games, and noise.

January 20th, 2010 Lisa Dyer Posted in Leadership, User Assistance | 3 Comments »

I suppose we’ll soon agree on a name for the era we’ve entered. The confluence of artificial intelligence, business intelligence, intelligent devices and networks, intelligent content, and open platforms seems to suggest “”The Era of Intelligent Systems” as offered by many scientists and industry leaders.

Just for fun, here’s a tagcloud I generated from a blog post by Jack Mason of IBM:

Point being, humankind is acutely aware that we are simultaneously drowning in useful information and lacking it, and there are more initiatives and ideas attempting to solve this problem than you can shake a web browser at.

The time for a handful of them has come. Not because they are new ideas, really, but because technology has finally caught up.

How does all  this affect the user assistance and knowledge communities? This is my somewhat disjointed list of focus areas.

Integrations of data, information, and knowledge

This decade might finally be the one in which Edward Tufte’s vision of the ideal one-page presentation of information, unbound by technology constraints, comes true.

The vision of Linked Data (formely Semantic Web) is still very relevant to the user assistance community, now more than ever. Wikipedia defines Linked Data as “a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web.”

For example, clouds, being what they are, will connect with other clouds. All of the content in those clouds needs to connect, too. This needs to happen in a secure, contextually correct, and enjoyable format. You don’t control all of those interconnected systems, obviously, so a layer of integration “hooks” is needed. Something easy enough for you and me to use.

At an implementation level, it behooves us to keep an eye on HTML5, OASIS standards and tools, and related initiatives such as microformats as technology parts of the solutions.

Business Intelligence (BI)

I had my real BI awakening a couple of years ago, when I discovered Google Analytics. The potential of open platforms with interfaces for the mere mortals to slice and present information blew my mind. Access to BI has not been all that democratic in the past–a common complaint in the UA field–but open platforms and interfaces have changed the game. It’s no wonder huge corporations and universities alike are banking on BI.

Don’t take my word for it. Vendors and consultants in the knowledge/information space are starting to incorporate BI in their strategies and solutions. BI for the masses will fuel a big change in the knowledge industry. All we really have to do is adopt it as best practice.

Intelligent content for intelligent devices

An intelligence device knows what I need, gives me a long enough lead time to act appropriately, and adjusts behavior based on my actions. Intelligent devices need intelligent content.

An example might be signing up to earn a [insert curriculum ] certification and getting an iPhone or iPad App that delivers content based on my progresssion, connects me to the community,  enables me and system together to improve my learning experience, and tracks and shares useful information.

Games

You know this intuitively: games are a great way to learn even the most arduous stuff. For example, I’ve always been hugely interested in medicine but never considered pursuing a degree in it. Instead, I played computer games in which you had to triage people with symptoms of varying emergency, and if you got it wrong, people died. I remember thinking then how much more we’d all achieve if we could do our learning through games.

Nowadays, when I recruit team talent, I look for interest in games. It’s not a deciding factor by any means: but I do think that some gaming experience or at least interest can foster a mindset that leads to better user assistance. Because games lack what I consider an artificial separation of function and information.

At an implementation level, there are may ways to go about delivering this, the iPhone idea being one and others described here. Related, take a look at what Sarah Maddox and crew at Atlassian are doing and try your hand at it.

Noise

I could talk about the noise-signal ratio in information, the fact that no machine can completely solve that problem, and how information professionals with a sound content strategy can help.

But I confess I was actually thinking about mechanical noise.

Voice-operated devices and systems will render this world a pretty noisy place. And it will be distracting and bothersome sometimes. But for safety and productivity reasons, it is big progress. Although the mind boggles at mashups, spoken out loud…not to mention, the unintended consequences of gesture-operated functions:)