Predicting the future is uncertain. Predicting a calendar for transformation is uncertainty squared. Transforming e-Knowledge aims to mobilize the energies of policy makers and practitioners to accelerate and facilitate the development of e-knowledge, not create a precise road map to the future. Nevertheless, it is useful to paint in broad strokes the time frames during which enterprises could expect to capitalize on the forces described in this book. Rather than providing precise milestones, this description is meant to stimulate the realization that most of the technologies needed are available today and can be substantially deployed by 2010.

Perhaps the most plausible prediction is that any prediction about serious matters is likely to be off the mark, except by accident.

Noam Chomsky

The overall time frames have been drawn from a set of resources describing the evolution of ambient intelligence environments, learning and knowledge standards, knowledge exchanges and marketplaces, enterprise applications infrastructures, advances in communities of practice, intelligent agents and search engines, and related developments. Between today and the year 2010, all of the primary elements enabling the full emergence of e-knowledge have the capacity to develop and be put in place.

The future is like heaven. Everyone exalts it, but nobody wants to go there now.

James Baldwin

This is not speculation in the style of Jules Verne or Arthur C. Clarke, reaching far beyond the capabilities of current technologies and into the long-term future.

The technologies, standards, infrastructures, and e-knowledge marketplaces needed to make e-knowledge a reality are either possible today or will be within a few years.

What is missing? The vision, perspectives, policies, procedures, routines, partnerships, cost structures, capabilities, experience, strategies, and will that is necessary to make e-knowledge happen. Our belief is that the greatest challenges to the development of e-knowledge will emerge within the human and relationship dimension. The table on the facing page summarizes the time frames for the arrival of technology, standards, and e-knowledge marketplaces necessary to transform e-knowledge.

Technology, Standards and
e-Knowledge Marketplaces

Most of the technologies and standards needed to support e-knowledge sharing exist in proof-of-concept form. Over time, they will spread among enterprises and spawn the development of exchanges and marketplaces that should progressively achieve economic viability by 2009.

e-Knowledge Standards. Learning object standards are in place today (metadata and modular content). A broader suite of knowledge interoperability standards will come into use, on a de facto or de jure basis, during 2003–2004.

Proof-of-Concept Repositories. MERLOT, SCORM-compliant repositories, scholarly e-prints, and a host of enterprise and cross-enterprise repositories exist today. Typically, these pioneering efforts are still expensive and have not automated and made routine the tagging process sufficiently to bring costs into an acceptable range.