Content isn’t King; its Context…
In a world of infinite choice, context — not content — is king.
~Chris Anderson
Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.
~Khaled Hosseini
Ask yourself, would you rather have data or wisdom? Probably wisdom right? Lets face it, you don’t see many references to the data rich old owl. How do you get to wisdom though? Well, dear reader, read on.
If you’ve never seen the knowledge hierarchy there’s a version of it below, which outlines how you get to wisdom.
As in the quote above, you can’t make decisions without consequences, this is a lesson I’m sure many people have learned to their cost. I’d love to tell you that I am exempt from poor decision making myself but I’ve had some whoppers in my time.
The thing that Kraken care about, though, is engineering data so what about the consequences of poor decisions in engineering? Well sadly, bad decisions here can be people or company killers, they can take years to come out in the wash and the people who made them may long since have disappeared.
If you were building a physical asset you would follow roughly these steps, give or take (look at BIM for example), your digital asset needs follow roughly the same path.
- Research/Feasibility
- Preliminary design/FEED
- Detail Design/Engineer
- Make/manufacture/project
- Handover
- Operate
- Decommission
You can argue over the number of steps and the detail of the process above but that is roughly the outline you’ll follow. The point is that each one of these steps can have largely different teams involved and they’re all independently making lots of decisions… So, lots of teams, lots of decisions and then you can’t go back and ask them because the project is finished or they work somewhere else.
Right, so far, so obvious I hear you say, so what about wisdom?
When you lose context behind important decisions you lose the reasons behind why a particular change happened.
This is an excellent way of losing confidence in a system or its data. And not far beyond losing confidence, is losing sanity.
What if a decision becomes contractual, affects the operations, or something worse? Seemingly nonsensical decisions can suddenly gain clarity when you have the context behind them.
Information management/knowledge management, whatever you want to call it exists for a reason and it, shouldn’t just be to collect data. Really what you want to achieve is knowledge so that you can then apply it (wisdom).
Ideally the decision was made with the best information possible at the time, so why limit yourself by not knowing what that information was?
When we started building Halcyon, this was one of the things that really seemed to be missing in engineering information management. Everyone concentrates only on the data, when what you really want to achieve is intelligence then wisdom. How can you trust your data without the context? Well, we don’t think you can.
So, we give our users that ability: we capture the data and the context.
We also make it easy for anyone to go back and search all that context throughout the entire project’s life, we think it’s a pretty compelling path to achieve wisdom.
All this of course brings us other possibilities, but more on that later.
