Web services promise to enable the easy seamless integration of disparate applications — ERP, legacy systems, best-of-breed specialty applications, and knowledge applications of all kinds. A seamless web of interoperable applications will succeed today’s distinct proprietary applications suites. These capabilities will enable organizations to reshape their business processes, support emergent communities of practice in new ways, and reshape their enterprise knowledge cultures. With each such reshaping, they become progressively better placed to spot barriers to innovation and ways to bridge the gap between “knowing” and “doing.”

Enterprises need to take a systemic view in reviewing and refashioning every aspect of their knowledge ecosystems, preparing for the new knowledge sharing capabilities and experiences that will be expected by learners, employees, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders. Future customer expectations should shape the vision and development of enterprise applications and solutions.

Planning from the
Future Backward

Today’s infrastructures are the foundations for the enterprise infrastructures of the future. But rather than extrapolating from today’s reality forward, it is preferable to use foresight planning to craft a vision of how we will experience e-knowledge in the future and the infrastructures and applications necessary to support those experiences. From that vision, we can “plan from the future backward,” identifying the gap between today’s environments and those required to meet the vision of tomorrow. Charting migration paths to the envisioned e-knowledge future will require progressive and systemic transformation of all of the aspects of organizational knowledge ecosystems.

Pervasive Technology Environments

Chapter 1 described the pervasive technology environments of the future, in which individuals will use mobile and ambient technology to communicate and experience e-knowledge at home, school, university, work, automobiles, and in a variety of public places.

Those environments profoundly change the availability of knowledge and the paths it follows, the speed with which it flows and the ways in which it is recognized, valued or found wanting. Knowledge ecosystems will change dramatically.

Put simply, these ambient and mobile environments constitute the gateway through which knowledge users will engage infrastructures and applications associated with the Internet/Web and with the variety of enterprises with which they associate. For any individual, these enterprises include various permutations of employer, school, college and university, other learning enterprises, professional societies and trade associations, government agencies, and other entities. The level of transitive trust that each individual places in these entities and the relative importance of their resources will shape the relative role they play in each individual’s constellation of relationships. Individuals will use personal portals or other means to manage their relationships with the interactivity and resources available through Web and the significant enterprises, like colleges and universities, with which they have trusted relationships.