by Anthony G. Oettinger
Anthony G. Oettinger is chairman
of the Program on Information Resources Policy at Harvard University, Maxwell Dworkin Building, Room 125, 33 Oxford
Street, Cambridge MA 02138; telephone: 617/495-4114; fax: 617/495-3338; e-mail:
pirp@deas.harvard.edu; Web: www.pirp.harvard.edu
Editor’s Note: This talk has been edited
from the notes for Dr. Oettinger’s keynote address to the 2000 Annual Meeting
of the American Society for Information Science and Technology: Knowledge Innovations: Celebrating Our
Heritage, Designing Our Future. Our thanks to Dr. Oettinger for making them
available in advance of the meeting.
Today, I shall draw on the resources of
the Harvard Program on Information Resources Policy
www.pirp.harvard.edu/home.html
which I chair, to help us to celebrate
our knowledge innovation (KI) heritage and consider its future.
Let me begin by showing you where we have
been and where we are today. I have picked my examples to illustrate common and
recurrent feelings of ecstasy about both promise and accomplishment in
knowledge innovations. Curiously, these same examples illustrate common and
recurrent feelings of agony – again, about both promise and accomplishment in
knowledge innovations. I shall attempt to explain why this is so.
For designing our future I shall modestly
limit myself to setting before you – in the hope you will find them useful or
at least illuminating – some fundamentals that I believe have enabled and
constrained the evolution of knowledge innovations. If my views are correct,
these same fundamentals shall continue in the future, and they account for our
common and recurrent feelings of both ecstasy and agony.
Celebrating Our Heritage:
KI: Whence?
As a starting point, today I will choose
the end of World War II. At that time modern digital information technologies
began to take off. My title for this talk, KI:
The Endless Adventure, plays on the title of a report written right after
World War II by one of the leaders of the research and development effort that
was so crucial in winning the war through the use of new technologies like the
atom bomb, radar and computers. The report was called Science, the Endless Frontier.
At about the same time its author,
Vannevar Bush, then director of the Office of Scientific Research and
Development, also wrote an article for The
Atlantic Monthly magazine. That article set forth a vision of knowledge
innovations that is fresh and to the point to this very day, over half a
century later. These two texts that Bush published in 1945 are the milestones I
have chosen to begin my account of where we have been. The sexy title, “As We
May Think,” (The Atlantic Monthly,
July 1945, 176 (1), 101-108; www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm) was an attention catcher then
and still is today.
Imagining the clutter and clitter-clatter
of his typewriter is but to underscore how visionary Bush truly was, writing at
a time when the typewriter was the measure of information-processing speed, not
the nanosecond or the femtosecond. I would paraphrase Bush’s central
propositions in the following way:
·
Amassed
knowledge is outrunning our ability to use it.
·
Information
Technology (IT) can fix this.
·
Let’s call
that IT fix “Memex.”
Let us turn to how Vannevar Bush himself expanded in
his own words on each of these three points.
Amassed
knowledge is outrunning our ability to use it: “The summation of human experience is
being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through
the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used
in the days of square-rigged ships.”
This
sounds very modern, except that we might not evoke sailing ships. We might
instead evoke legacy mainframes from the days before the Internet.
IT
can fix this: “Such machines will have enormous appetites. . . will take
instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple keyboard
punches and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes. There
will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions
of people doing complicated things.”
Note
Vannevar Bush’s casual reference to a roomful of girls, so politically
incorrect today, and to their keyboard punches. Of course keyboard-data-entry boiler
rooms are quite common around the globe today, although almost instantaneous
display of a customer record has replaced the printing of “sheets of computed
results every few minutes.”
Note
especially how, in the second sentence, Bush has shifted the context from “the
summation of human experience” to “the detailed affairs of millions of people.”
In contemporary terms he has shifted his ground from the most pie-in-the-sky
wish list of knowledge innovations to the most down-to-earth bread-and-butter
of transaction processing.
The
subtle, perhaps unconscious, shifting of ground from knowledge enhancement to
transaction processing makes a world of difference as regards the likelihood of
experiencing the ecstasy of accomplishment versus the agony of failure. Why
this bait-and-switch distinction is so fundamental is the central point that I
aim to develop in the remainder of this talk.
Let’s
call the IT fix “Memex”: “the
basic idea. . . is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select
immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the
Memex. The process of tying two items together is the most important thing.”
“So
he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it
to his friend.”
Vannevar
Bush clearly had the contemporary marketeer’s flair for the sexy name.
The effect of this sloganeering is what
Bush’s contemporary, the British philosopher K.J.W. Craik, called “false
hypostatization.” (The nature of
explanation. Cambridge, England: University Press, 1952.) In plain English,
this means giving the false impression that because there is a name, there must
also be something that the name names. Think of Pegasus, the winged horse!
False hypostatization leads to that ecstasy of anticipation of early
achievement (Nobel Prize, IPO, whatever your favorite fantasy) that energizes
both scientific inquiries and entrepreneurial venture.
What
Memex names continues to be the Holy
Grail of what I call the Artificial Intelligentsia. But I remind you that here,
today, in the year 2000, it is I, not a machine, who remembered “As We May
Think” as a seminal reading from my youth. I recovered it from The Atlantic
Monthly’s online archive with a
well aimed intellectual rifle shot, not a vague Internet search. Think of your
favorite browser and then imagine doing that trail with microfilm, the hot new
technology of Bush’s day. But what a vision! What an inspiration! What ecstasy!
Celebrating
Our Heritage: Where Are We?
How
is Vannevar Bush’s vision faring 50 years later? Is the inspiration alive and
well? Let’s try searching “information technology” on Yahoo:
“5223 sites in 127 categories. . .”
Those search results are what you
get today on the Web! Think of setting Vannevar Bush’s “reproducer in action,
photograph[ing] the whole trail out, and pass[ing] it to [your] friend.” The
good news is that technology can do it today, when it couldn’t in his day. The
bad news is the same agony: excessively high recall, excessively low precision.
But
please note that hope also springs eternal, along with despair! Bush’s ecstasy,
too, is alive and well, albeit expressed in the contemporary corporate jargon!
“What
if you lived in a world where computers could make sense of the ever increasing
volumes of Web pages, emails, documents. . .”
Indeed,
right here, today, within the hour, in the session that follows this talk, we
shall have an ecstatic claim: ”Effective Cross-Language Information Retrieval
(CLIR) systems save Internet users from [Babel]. . .”, tempered by an agonized
disclaimer, “Panelists will explore the use of new technologies to overcome
problems inherent in CLIR.”
Designing
the Future: Agony and Ecstasy Forever?
What’s
going on here? What can we learn from the past and from the present that might
shed light on how to place our bets on the future?
So
far we have observed recurring ecstasy over amazing progress in IT as applied
to transaction processing and the like and recurring agony over losing ground
in extracting knowledge from data. I shall now attempt to explain why this
combination of ecstasy and agony keeps recurring and why I think we will cycle
through ecstasy and agony forever.
I
propose two fundamental, interlinked reasons:
·
IT sometimes helps. We’re ecstatic when IT helps us, but we
agonize when it fails and, in our agony, we turn once again to ourselves, to
people. But. . . .
·
People’s M.O.s (modus operandi) are
eclectic and – sometimes – mysteriously effective.
Let’s look at the details of those two propositions.
Let us have
a closer look at when IT can help. As shown in Figure 1 information is only one
of three basic resources on which all of us depend, the other two being energy
and materials:
·
Without
materials, there is nothing.
·
Without
energy, nothing happens.
·
Without
information, nothing makes sense.
IT
has gotten amazingly smaller, faster, cheaper, better in the last few decades –
a trend that promises to continue into the foreseeable future, but which is not
nearly so much in prospect for energy and materials.
In
such a context, information is important, but it is most often only the means
to other ends. You can’t eat information, you can’t wear it and you can’t live
in it. For instance, ecstasy about the marvelous information flows involved in
e-commerce turns to agony if the goods can’t be manufactured and delivered to
you. That is why United Parcel Service stock rose along with the dot-com
stocks.
Figure
1 also displays three distinct aspects of information: substance, format and
process. The substance of information is its meaning, its significance, what we
value it for. The format of information is its shape, its embodiment, like ink
on paper or sound in the air or pixels on a flat-panel display. Information
processes transport, combine or transform formats.
IT
has given us an abundance of new formats that are much smaller, faster, cheaper
and better than anything that Bush foresaw. IT now enables us to process these
formats with speed that would boggle his mind.
But
there remains a fundamental limitation on these processes that 50 years of
efforts by our colleagues in the artificial intelligentsia have barely begun to
alleviate. Creative processing of substance to turn raw data into useful
knowledge remains a monopoly of our flesh and blood minds. In 2000, as in 1945,
Bush’s “As We May Think” remains a
tantalizing speculation, not a fait
accompli. When it comes to thinking, IT still can’t hack it. And, as we
shall see, when it comes to thinking and acting collectively, we don’t shine so
brightly either.
In
Figure 2, The Information Business Map, we apply the aspects of information in
Figure 1 to analyze the conditions under which IT is most or least likely
to help us. The vertical scale of the map runs from products to services as the buyer’s ongoing dependence
on the seller increases. The horizontal scale runs from pure forms, namely
formats and processes devoid of substance, to pure substance, namely substance
whose embodiment is of quite secondary interest to the buyer.
As
the examples located on the chart illustrate, goods toward the left of the map
are either devoid of substance, such as blank paper, or leave substance
unaffected by whatever processes are applied to the formats that embody the
substance. Such examples include the transport of a sealed envelope or the
faithful transmission of an e-mail message. In these instances improvements in
IT lead, in the short run, to performance improvements that match results to
expectations and smooth out the peaks of ecstasy and the valleys of agony.
At
the other extreme, in the upper right hand corner of the map, where the
examples are the services of people deciding, people advising and people
authoring, the activities are all about substance. The peaks of ecstasy and the
valleys of agony are most pronounced here where the substance of information
matters and, especially, where the substance of information is undergoing
change. Here IT helps the least.
So
the headline from a recent article in the New
York Times should not surprise us:
“The Search Engine
as Cyborg: As the Web sprawls out of control, search engines are overheating
and programmers are trying something new: human beings.” (June 29, 2000, p.
E-1) This is the contemporary reaction to our contemporary agony: The headline
is good news for some of you: thinking human indexers and thoughtful human
editors are in for a renaissance, applying new means to traditional ends.
What is the bad news? The bad news
is that people are all over the lot. Sometimes we are mysteriously effective.
Sometimes we are also ineffective in mysterious ways that limit the scope of
useful exploitation of IT for knowledge innovation, even when people are doing
the thinking.
Hence the recurrent ecstasy over
what we hope to do with new IT and the recurrent agony of re-discovering not
only that IT can’t hack it without people, but that people aren’t the answer
either.
To
help clarify where people are fundamentally limited, allow me first to
introduce you to some detail about people’s M.O.s and, second, to introduce you
to the UAPS, the Universe of All Possible Substance.
In
the real world, people use all of the processes shown in Table 1. The table
focuses on processes we use to guide our business decisions. IT can help
mightily with some of these processes, mainly the formal ones, but not at all
with others among them, especially the informal ones.
|
Inside
Sources |
Outside
Sources |
Personal
Knowledge |
|
|
Formal
Processes |
MIS; Scanning Special studies |
Web search; Traditional media; Trade
associations; Consultants |
Training Education |
|
Informal
Processes |
At the water cooler: “What do you
think, Joe”? |
Web browse Golf course Cocktail parties |
Experience |
Let
me try to sharpen this insight further by calling to your attention a process
that is a prerequisite for any meaningful application of the processes listed
in this chart. It is the process of aligning our universes of discourse so that
meaningful conveyance of substance can take place. What do I mean? To explain
it, I invite you to consider the UAPS, the Universe of All Possible Substance.
The UAPS encompasses all the data, all the information, all the knowledge, all
the wisdom that ever was, that is now and that ever will be. The UAPS is
therefore boundless, and only an eternal and omniscient being could fathom it
all.
Which
leads me toward what is possible for us mere mortals and to what there is to
align.
If
the UAPS is a continuum, then you and I have only a limited window on it (Figure 3) laboriously gained through
all the formal and informal processes I listed in Table 1. This window is my
universe of discourse. It is surrounded by the limitless expanse of the unk-unks, the unknown unknowns, the
things which each of us doesn’t even know we don’t know. The unk-unks are
literally and figuratively the darkest part of this picture. Even our open
window is usually beclouded by what the military strategist Von Clausewitz
referred to as “the fog of war.” The little dots denote the fog beclouding our
window on the UAPS.
So,
what is there to align? It is not only that our windows on the UAPS are narrow
slits in the infinite expanse of unk-unks, they are also usually misaligned.
Some communication may be possible between the people depicted in the top two
rows of Figure 4, but neither of them has anything substantive in common with the
person depicted in the third row. Their universes of discourse do not overlap.
This
misalignment is not necessarily a matter of not speaking the same language.
More fundamentally, it is a matter of seeing different aspects of the world
through different lenses. For communication and collaboration to exist, in
other words for a coherent social order to exist among this group of three,
their windows on the UAPS must at least overlap.
What
does it take to get our universes of discourse, our windows (or UAPSs for
short) well aligned? Two sets of concepts will help us understand. The first
set of concepts breaks substance down
into two aspects: cow and bull.
·
Pure Cow is data without any frame of context or
frame of reference.
·
Pure Bull is context or frame of reference,
without any data.
Cow and Bull here are technical terms, no pejorative connotations intended.
Knowledge is born of the union of cow and bull, whereby data become meaningful
relative to a specific context or a frame of reference.
The
second set of concepts breaks circumstance
down into two aspects, namely stasis
and change. Here are my
rough-and-ready definitions:
·
Stasis is the way it was, or seemed to be, in the good old days
when tomorrow was like yesterday.
·
Change is
the way it is now, ever since the Internet hit the fan. . . and promises to be
for way ahead.
If
we combine substance and circumstance (Table 2) we now have in hand enough
conceptual armament for a closer look at why the peaks of ecstasy and the
valleys of agony are most pronounced when the substance of information is both
relevant and undergoing change. And why, under these conditions, IT performs
the worst and our windows on the UAPS need the most alignment.
|
|
Cow |
Bull |
Stasis
|
Steady-state Cow |
Steady-state Bull |
|
Change |
Transient Cow |
Transient Bull |
Consider
the combination of Transient Cow and Transient Bull. Here, there is no stable
context or frame of reference in which to interpret data, which itself is
changing. Our windows on the UAPS are totally fogged over. Under these
circumstances, IT produces GIGO (garbage in and garbage out) at its worst: a
deluge of changing data that is uninterpretable in a shifting context. Economic
productivity data from 1990 forward is a prime example.
People
cope as best they can, the sensible and aware ones shifting their reliance from
the formal processes to the informal in Table 1. Venture capitalists place
bets, and those who are both smart and
lucky survive. Once the winner is known and when and if stability returns,
everyone’s window on the UAPS gets aligned with the winner’s. With 20/20
hindsight, the winner then looks prescient. There is ecstasy for selected
entrepreneurs at the time when bets are placed, agony for the losers when the
startup fails, as most do.
On
the other hand, Steady-state Cow
(data) in conjunction with Transient Bull
(context) gives the illusion of knowledge, an illusion born of the mismatch of
cow and bull. Data is meaningless in a shifting context. Consider the monitor
information at any major airport in foul weather.
In
the third case, Steady-state Cow
coupled with Steady-state Bull gives
us accepted and stable knowledge. Newtonian mechanics for the solar system is
perhaps the best example. We confidently rely on its theory and its data to
send people to the moon, to lob missiles across oceans and to design thrill
rides for amusement parks.
And
finally, of course, Transient Cow and
Steady-state Bull: knowledge born of
the union of cow and bull. Change is intelligible in a reliable context such as
stock prices and indices in a stable economy.
Lest
these four baby examples mislead you into thinking that I’m playing childish
games, let me conclude with a few glimpses of a thorough study of a real life
situation. In this instance IT sometimes helped and sometimes failed, and the
misalignment of UAPSs, owing to mind-boggling mismatches of cow and bull, led
to tragedy of a not uncommon kind.
I
quote from a forthcoming review by Karl E. Weick, a professor at the University
of Michigan School of Business Administration, of Scott A. Snook’s Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of
U.S. Blackhawks over Northern Iraq (Princeton University Press, 2000) to appear in Administrative Science Quarterly:
“Friendly fire” is a military term that refers to casualties
unintentionally inflicted on one’s own forces. . . . Twenty six. . . people
died by friendly fire during peace-keeping operations after the Gulf war, when
two US Air Force F-15 fighters shot down two US Army helicopters as a crew of
19 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) air traffic controllers, in
charge of those 4 aircraft, looked on. This shootdown, which occurred on April
14, 1994, is the subject of this remarkable book by Scott Snook.
The heart of the matter is expressed in
one of many vignettes in the book that focus on misaligned UAPSs and on
mismatched cow and bull:
[Snook]
shows that meaning rather than decision making is at the heart of the
shootdown. There is a fascinating glimpse of just how complicated
organizational behavior can be. The task force commander of this Iraqi
operation, General B.G. Pilkington, is the exemplary leader we all talk about.
. . . But his hands-on experience has blind spots. He piloted F-16 aircraft,
which fly both at high and low altitudes and whose pilots are briefed about low
flying aircraft (p. 175). Pilkington assumed that all pilots, including F-15
pilots, were similarly briefed, which was not true. Because he had been so
close to the action, Pilkington assumed if there was a lack of integration among
the services he would know about it. Since he didn’t know about any lack of
integration, then it didn’t exist. . . .
Organizations
that face trying conditions with catastrophic potential have now become the
rule rather than the exception.
Scott
Snook has raised for all of us the fascinating question, what is the equivalent
of friendly fire in non-military settings? When do we mistake friendly
helicopters for unfriendly enemy? Do we have leaders whose knowledge is
equivalent to “pigs looking at watches”? Do we innovate and assume that others
with whom we mesh are not and are toeing the line?
To
reemphasize what Weick sees as one of Snook’s key findings: “[Snook] shows that meaning rather than
decision making is at the heart of the shootdown.”
Weick
says “meaning” where I would say “substance,” but the point is the same.
To quote further from Weick’s
review, “The on-board commander, the highest ranking person on the aircraft
testified that. . . he had ‘no idea what those radar blips mean.’ (‘I’m like a
pig looking at a watch.’)” Another barnyard figure of speech! I would say, “I’m
looking at pure cow without bull to interpret it.” (Testimony quoted from Fire, p. 127.)
In
short, Weick’s generalizations from Snook’s case study are “Do we have leaders
whose knowledge is equivalent to ‘pigs looking at watches’? Do we innovate and
assume that others with whom we mesh are toeing the line?”
Living
together, learning together, doing together are the traditional and still the
most effective known means for achieving a modicum of overlap of the disparate
windows on the UAPS of new hires in the corporation, of raw recruits in the
military or of entering freshmen in academe. This is what team building is all
about. It is also where IT still can contribute the least.
This
fundamental truth about KI accounts for why so often the initial ecstasy over
new IT turns into agony when the realization sets in that the new IT can do
little to help to sidestep the cost of education, indoctrination or training.
Hence it can save little in money or time to be paid for aligning people’s
windows on the UAPS, windows that are usually shifted and befogged by the very
process of innovation
Weick’s
conclusion and my recommendation to you: “The questions, both in practice and
in theory, that flow out of this book seem to be endless. I can’t wait to teach
this book to Ph.D.s as well as executives. I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t
benefit from grappling with it.”
For
more specific or greater depth on my talk today, please see the publications of
the Program on Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, which are
accessible and downloadable at www.pirp.harvard.edu/pubs/home.html.
© Copyright 2000 by the
President and Fellows of Harvard College. Permission to reproduce and use all
or part of this article is granted provided that the source and authorship of
the material is clearly stated and the copyright notice is retained on the
copies.
A note on figures and
tables: Figures 1-4 and
Table 1 were adapted from articles by Mr. Oettinger and co-authors that
appeared in Compaine, B.M. & Read, W.H. (Eds.) (1999). The information resources policy handbook: Research for the information
age. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Table
1 was adapted from an article “Managing information: Back to basics” by B.M.
Compaine and J.F. McLaughlin in that same publication (p. 369).
Figure 1: Substance, Format, Process
Figure 2: The Information Business Map
Figure 3: Our Narrow Window on the UAPS:
One Mortal’s Slice
Figure 4: Our Misaligned Windows on the
UAPS
Table 1: People’s M.O.s.: Eclectic and
Mysterious
Table 2: Substance and Circumstance