Mare Nostrum

Sticky ideas

I often think that the IT business needs to look beyond its borders. There are all kinds of debates in content management and collaboration circles that boil down to relatively simple questions, often asked and answered by people outside our field. For example, IT professionals often worry that important bits of information aren't getting the attention they deserve. For example, Mike Gotta of the Burton Group recently posted on his blog a set of questions about "event stream processing." He does a nice job of linking it to some real-world use cases in the US government around "need to know" versus "right to know." Here's the kind of puzzle that gets under his skin:

Specifically, I'm looking at how attention data and "post" activities act as informal, loosely-coupled signaling methods that, when streamed in a public manner, can be combined with sensor/filter/relay mechanisms to intelligently pull messages and information to other people or situate the information to the right place (e.g., a "my space" created as a honey pot of sorts to house interesting/relevant items).

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Internet, a recent Scientific American podcast featured an interview with one of the authors of Made To Stick, which tries to explain why certain scientific discoveries get attention, and others don't. We assume that, as soon as someone makes a discovery, it instantly leaps into practice. However, it often takes years, or even decades, for the implications of a discovery to sink in, or for someone to realize its practical implications. For example, the first steam engine wasn't invented by Thomas Newcomen. That honor goes to Hero of Alexandria, an ancient Greek who documented how to drive the rotation of a sphere through the expulsion of steam. More modern inventors toyed with steam engines before Newcomen and Watt convinced people that they were worth putting into mass application.

And that's just one interesting book on the subject of how "to intelligently pull messages and information to other people" that historians of science, psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers have discovered. Maybe it's time for IT to incorporate as more social science into its work?