主题：宏观ICT的一点想法 -- 闻弦歌
[FLY]evolution, revolution?[/FLY]
早些年的时候，常听到信息革命、知识经济在各种媒体频频出现轰炸人们的视听。等到社会真正迈进了这个阶段，反倒听闻得少了。（就像我对“实现四个现代化”的口号印象的变化一样， -- 小学时还常把它写到作文里，中学时街巷里标语还常见，到读大学时勉强能记起的是有类相声里搞成语接龙，末了要能绕到“实现四化”那就承认对方同大学毕业。现在还纳闷工业、农业、国防、科学技术究竟是同时达到现代化，还是陆续实现的？）不过毋庸置疑，信息和通讯技术（ICT）的发展带给社会的革命性的变化（revolution）。可从个人体验来讲，感觉是渐变的演进(evolution)。
[FLY]Koala's evolution[/FLY]
树袋熊（Koala）算得上是哺乳类动物中很能睡的动物，一天大约要睡19个小时（motionless,据wikipedia）。这种习性能使它维持在很低的新陈代谢水平。 树袋熊很早就出现在澳洲大陆上，现在已有在北部地区发现的2千万前的化石（哺乳动物起源于三叠纪末到侏罗纪初）。当时这个地区是热带雨林，慢慢地演化成了现在有桉树林披被的半荒漠。我猜测可能是树袋熊采取了一种消极的进化策略：和食物丰盛的热带雨林比起来，桉树叶的营养实在是少得可怜啊。怎么办？多睡睡吧，减少些能量损失。（树袋熊的另外一些特性：基本不喝水，从桉树叶中获取水分；肝脏有很强的解毒功能（桉树叶有毒，据wikipedia)。
[FLY]Evolution is so impressive.[/FLY]
从树袋熊的新陈代谢进化/演化，联想到社会的信息代谢进化/演化。看到有许多谈宏观经济，大历史的，我也自然有了一点儿对MACRO-ICTs的思考。有一回要写个paper,也就把一些想法写进去了。现在摘录几段，抛砖引玉，希望看看大家的见解。
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In an agrarian society, knowledge about literature, religion, art, and primitive science was mostly created and accessed by noblemen and scholars. Physical representation of knowledge was expensive before the popularization of paper making technology and typography. Education was limited to a small range of people. At this stage, knowledge about ecology and agrarian production were community based indigenous knowledge, which is characterized as a mixture of knowledge, practice, and belief.1
After paper-making technology and typography had been invented, the expense of the physical realization and propagation of knowledge were dramatically decreased; education became possible for the general public. But the processes of knowledge creation, propagation, and application had not been tremendously commoditized.2
In the rapid developing period of industrial society as the modern science architecture was established, there was a great demand for absorbing educated laborers into working environment, which encouraged fundamental education to all public and then led to the separation of roles in knowledge activities (making knowledge, transferring knowledge, and using knowledge). But cultural influences and structural factors between upper classes and lower classes have different impacts on “cultural capital acquisition”.3 Children from upper classes generally could achieve a higher level of education, and have more of a chance of becoming professionals in good occupations.4
footnote 2: The wide application of typography is the major cause of the booming of Shu-Yuan (one type of unoffical colleges by the Confucianists in Chinese history) in Song Dynasty (960-1279). In medieval Europe, this new mechanical means of mass producing books helped to meet the large demand of monastic scriptoria.
过于研究性的footnotes1， 3， 4省了。
With the rapid development of information and communication technologies, we could see the beginning of an information society: knowledge commoditization makes knowledge accessible to the public at very low expense; the information metabolisms of any person and any organization speed up dramatically; and knowledge-associated business activities have fundamental influences on the society.
Collaboration in information society
Philip E. Agre (1995) outlined that information activities in information society can be summarized as: possession, accumulation, surfeit (“overload”), distributional inequality (“haves and have-nots”), measurement, commoditization and so on (1995). These stories about information must have a location. He considered information as “a content divorced from any specific physical realization (speech, paper, computer chips, fiber optic cables)” (Agre, 1995).
Currently, with the rapid development of Information and Communication Technologies, we should understand that:
1.Information’s physical realization becomes easier since digital forms serves as the intermediate, which means multiple channels are accessible for quick information propagation and transformation. And in consequence that encourages organizations to flatten their structures for quick response and also exploit potential efficiencies to achieve better decision making, work coordination and job performance.
2.Knowledge artifacts constitute important assets of information society. Knowledge-intensive firms have segregated knowledge centralized activities (as Agre (1995) described) from classic businesses. Domains and boundaries of those activities become ambiguous and variable in regards to the closer collaboration in knowledge development and application in this knowledge-intensive working environment, which adversely increases the complexity of continually developing Information and Communication Technologies for providing further facilitation.
In the following sections I will discuss the general collaboration in knowledge development (focusing on research methodologies) and knowledge application (focusing on business processes). A series of topics that IT professionals most face are discussed accordingly.
Knowledge development
In traditional knowledge management, capturing knowledge means searching knowledge objects based on taxonomy. The processes of creating new knowledge or deriving new knowledge from existing knowledge remained within small size communities formally or informally established by a few experts, and were intangible to large public.5
footnote 5
Examples like Confucious (551-479 BC) and his seventy-two talent students (out of 3000 students) , Aristotle (384-322 BC) and his students; traditional science correspondence among mathematicians, physics scientists, chemists, and etc. Academy of Sciences and kinds of profession societies/associations in different countries inherently encourage those knowledge development activities.
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IT professionals are developing technologies for restructuring the knowledge taxonomy. Text mining or “knowledge discovery in text” is one approach to deriving high quality information. Another more active approach is using tagging technology. The proposed Semantic Web based on XML and RDF, is considered as the widest common-use application enabling computers and people working in cooperation (Aggar, 2004). But the problem IT professionals have to deal with is that sometimes the derived knowledge has to be reexamined to make sure it is close to the user's specification, and should not be too abstracted to be meaningful.
IT professionals could also build knowledge management systems for helping professionals in all sorts of industries, which consequently provide more efficient working environment and create new value from the derived knowledge. Knowledge Management System (KMS) is “a distributed hypermedia system for managing knowledge in organizations, supporting creation, capture, storage and dissemination of expertise and knowledge” (“Knowledge Management System” at wikipedia). We can all agree that Information and Communication Technologies have already brought the conveniences integrating geographically distributed human resources within a big organization or across different organizations. Now we can see the large possibility to overcome knowledge gaps among different fields and get synergistic work done as Knowledge Management System grow to be mature in the near future. Earley stated the framework of knowledge management system: “Most knowledge systems have at their core a repository of artifacts along with a means of submitting, vetting, approving, tagging, and reviewing knowledge objects”. These procedures should reflect the nature of knowledge objects in the context of that particular organization, and should be customized for being adapted into the organization in accordance with its particular business strategies.
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But a big challenge is that although ICT does not deprive knowledge access from the knowledge user, it does make up or refurnish the knowledge itself. For easing the knowledge propagation and utilization, some knowledge is condensed or encapsulated, and sometimes the ground work is far away from a general user. For example, a web programmer using Microsoft Visual Studio can easily create a web service that allows other websites to access and execute remote methods. But the problem is, Microsoft has done too much encapsulation. The user only needs to click and drag the mouse in the IDE, without knowing anything about SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, which creates the unnecessary difficulty of understanding the necessary technology XML serialization. So, IT professionals should not only focus on facilitating knowledge development for the large population of general users, but also should allow the advanced knowledge user – who sometimes can be a good knowledge creator and educator – to have an insight into well-wrapped knowledge objects. In this context, the GNU philosophy and achievements advocated by Richard Stallman are particularly relevant.
The other challenge IT professionals are facing is how to avoid social dislocation among professionals in those differentiated knowledge development environments. Issues taken into consideration include: how to make smooth transition from traditional school learning (for the rudiments in some science area) to work environment learning (lifelong learning for advanced knowledge); and how to utilize Information and Communication Technologies to optimize knowledge development for both efficiency and usability. Notice that failing in these two areas would create social dislocation, and structural unemployment might happen, which is a great threat to information-intensive firms.
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Knowledge application
In the industrial society, most classic economics rely on the labour theory of value (“Labour theory of value” at wikipedia), which is a major pillar of traditional Marxian economics; in the post-industrial society (information society), knowledge theory of value have taken over as the magic stick and knowledge-intensive firms are emerging as the dominant driver of social evolution.
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Virtual products (like intellectual properties) or services allow various organizations as multiple agents to pass on business flows and add value to them. Reputation or favorable degree plays a key role in the co-competition in the value chain(Sheehan 2005). Notice that if there is no outstanding traditional advantage for any organization in the value chain, the determinant factor in profits repartition is public attention.
There are two apparent strategies – unbounded collaborations, and bounded collaborations, appearing in two distinct examples: web content aggregation and digital rights management –DRM (such as Apple Itune Store). Some people might argue that web content aggregators like Yahoo and Google play destructive roles and they are depriving the business profits from other co-competitors in the same value chain, and thus will eliminate the diversity of business participants in the global market and discourage the innovation initiatives. Meanwhile some others might argue that it is an unavoidable approach of revolution in chain value as the result of unbounded collaborations promoted by further knowledge commoditization (down to zero?). Controversial opinions have been talked about DRM (Free software foundation suggest to use digital restrictions management as a better term), the opposite strategy side of web content aggregation.
IT professionals have to take care of the context of client's organization in business value, and be aware that the customized knowledge application must be in accordance with the coherent nature of collaborations within organization and across organization.
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