by John Regazzi
Information Innovation is occurring all around us and changing the way we understand and interact with our world. Innovations in information are changing the ways we use and exchange information in economic terms as well as affecting our personal and professional knowledge space. The College of Information and Computer Science at Long Island University is focused on the confluence of Technology, People, and Information. We are seeing broad and significant shifts in each of these spaces.
Some key shifts:
Technology. Information technology is moving on two axes very quickly: from the pc to the net, and from the desk to the hand. Recently Elevation Partners invested $325 million, of nearly 20% of their portfolio, in Palm Inc, which has been lagging the market for some time. The key rationale for this bet is the increasing accelerated innovation taking place in transforming mobile phones to computers. What underlines much of this changing environment, is the increasing development of modular web-based software services available to a host of computing devices particularly cell phones and related PDA devices. These modules are being developed by such companies as Google, Yahoo, and Apple while Microsoft and others struggle with the releases on new operating systems and other software upgrades for the pc.
People. Another interesting shift occurred in early June 2006. The number of Google searches in the United States for “social computing” exceed the number of requests for “knowledge management”, and the same thing occurred globally by December of last year. Matthew Brown, of Forrester, noted in a recent report on the Information Workspace: “When knowledge management (KM) practices, tools, and architectures burst onto the scene in the mid-1990s, they looked a lot like the old economy businesses that built them, hierarchical and workflow-driven. Now, social computing tools and communities are flattening those architectures and extending the reach of KM well beyond the walls of the conventional enterprise to touch customers and business partners.” People are relying less and less on the process driven, data modeled systems of KM, and are innovating on how to manage their expertise, knowledge, and problem solving across the enterprise in differ and new ways.
Information. Search is being challenged in ways no one expected even several years ago. In a New York Times article Udi Manber, Google’s head of search quality notes “ Expectations are higher now. When search first started, if you searched and found something it was a miracle. Now if you don’t get exactly what you want in the first three results, something is wrong.” The bar will be raised even higher, as search engine companies become not only more precise, but also able to provide exact meaning and trends from the structured and unstructured data being searched. This will move the field from information retrieval to knowledge discovery, as search companies move users from items they find relevant to knowledge insights and discovery that they have not before considered.
The Information Innovation Exchange will look at these shifts and others like them occurring through information innovations. We hope that it will allow you to think about these changes, call others to our attention, and comment on their impact on you, your organizations, your businesses, and your professional life. Each issue will have an opening essay followed by items of interest that touch some form of information innovation. We hope this blog will be as useful to you as it is to our College faculty and students.
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