Taking some inspiration from Lou's EIA roadmap, I offer my view of the milestones in in the development of enterprise weblog information services. This illustration will be used in my Computers in Libraries presentation. While it provides the basis for my discussion around weblog services, it also allows me an opportunity to further discuss my view of information systems in the wake of recent doubts about KM as a valuable commodity in enterprise.

This is a short roadmap and the milestones are somewhat large targets, i.e. not considering the small steps in between. In my presentation I touch on some of the smaller steps necessary to get to the milestones and some of the cultural and political aspects that affect success at reaching each goal. This is mostly reactive strategy. It is a way to prepare for growth of grass-roots created knowledge and to meet the growth with information systems that can be used for sense making. I must stress that it is NOT intended to suggest that you must urge knowledge creation in the enterprise. I don't think that needs to be the goal of the information services organization.

!http://urlgreyhot.com/photos/albums/blog/weblog_services_roadmap.jpg!

I should note that the "near term" milestone suggests taking one or both of two paths: 1) providing enterprise blogging software and/or 2) being able to work with a diverse set of grassroots created knowledge. The second path has to do with my mention of diverse ecology, and alludes to the creation of a system that can aggregate XML data. My position is that an enterprise information services organization needn't push individuals to capture knowledge in blogs, but should instead react to organic efforts to capture knowledge. I should also note that this is not encouraging tacit knowledge capture. While some bloggers may choose to blog tacit knowledge if they like, the idea of forcing this kind of recording is the cause of many failed KM efforts. A good deal of explicit knowledge capture contained in writings, email discussion, formal publications, etc. is fodder for knowledge mining.

Some market researchers have been attempting to describe the failure of KM in recent years while others attempt to describe how KM is evolving now to allow diversity in the information ecology. But these reports remain nebulous about how to do KM right -- how to better extract and represented knowledge in information systems. For me, the process of envisioning a narrow information services roadmap has helped organize in my mind the concepts for information systems that take the burden of knowledge creation and organization away from the individual knowledge worker. A lot of my vision is interested in watching the interests of users in information nuggets they publish, in topic tracking interests they record, etc. The design concept is concerned with turning patterns of use into describable entities. For instance, "Michael Angeles (person)" is interested in "Information Architecture (topic)". The idea is to clearly define those entities and create rules for the extraction of those entities from various forms of published matter. That is to say, to let the system parse and extract terms and be able to distinguish that "Michael Angeles" is a known person or that "Information Architecture" is a known topic. Those entities can then used for social networking -- to interconnect experts in the enterprise. I discuss this idea a bit in my previous blog entry.

Extracting bits of explicit knowledge and inferring and suggesting the relationships of people to concepts, concepts to concepts, and people to people should be the role of the knowledge-based information system. This is the far off goal.