Friday, October 19, 2007

Not managing knowledge

we are not about managing anybody's knowledge. we are about making that knowledge come to your mind quicker and easier in a form that helps you draw out new meanings and pattern recognitions. you manage your knowledge and your networks. knowledge self management system or something... there are deep assumptions about power and collaboration built into what xigi is and what it does best. that said, giving a self described power user like A a dashboard for a wicked problem solution could pay well and push our understanding of the kinds of problems we are working on. R, our multinational corporation customers, has a wicked problem but people don't see it as readily.

medical debt is a wicked problem and people see it as such; something that changes its essential nature by how you define it. and that people will not agree on a definition. but you can create tools to help you manage toward partial, mediated solutions on a broad variety lower but still functionally meaningful levels, and create a kind of political working consensus on how things work and can be defined.
for example, we don't define social enterprise, because no one will agree on a definition. the word is invested with a dogmatic, intractable element of belief tied to a theory of change, of how the world should be. but we can define what investors expect from their money; market rate return or a mix of risk, return and impact.

if we built a tool to help with this project it would be a cool story to sell.
it would show we have a tool that facilitates the analysis and solution of wicked problems. there are a lot of big customers who'd want something like that.

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