These vignettes from our e-knowledge future represent a true “jump shift” in how people in many professional and academic settings experience knowledge. They capture the essence of how all kinds of people will use the pervasive atmosphere of e-knowledge to change the ways they live, work, learn, and enrich their personal development. Yet in many ways, these vignettes are familiar. They contain elements that we all recognize from leading-edge practitioners in today’s developing e-knowledge environment. However, they are quite different from today in an important way: the seamless, personalized, and transformative use of e-knowledge that will be possible in the future, but is not fully possible today, even in demonstration settings.

Even leading-edge enterprises cannot live the future portrayed in these vignettes — yet. The development of numerous, necessary elements of the e-knowledge telecosm are still in our future:

• truly pervasive, interoperable, and scalable standards and e-knowledge infrastructures and marketplaces;
• seamless integration of the structures and techniques of e-knowledge in enterprises;
• well-developed competencies in the use of e-knowledge for individuals, teams, communities, and enterprises; and
• proven capacity to reinvent processes and reward new patterns of behavior.

Some of the elements of this future will be developed externally and/or by groups of individuals or enterprises. Others are within the grasp of individuals and each organization. Our e-knowledge vision can and must vault into the future. However, our actual progress is more methodical, evolutionary, and exploratory. It is about charting migration paths that are expeditionary.

Expeditionary e-knowledge initiatives enable individuals and enterprises to chart migration paths to their e-knowledge future. Through these initiatives, enterprises will develop ICT infrastructures to support e-learning and knowledge management, reinvent processes, and build competencies, discover what works in the use of e-knowledge and reinvent best practices, business models and strategy. Such initiatives are our probes into the future of e-knowledge.

Particular migration paths vary by industry, enterprise, and setting. Migration paths are built on two elements: revolutionary vision and expeditionary action. The essential animating element of migration paths is a keen understanding of the transformative power of e-knowledge. A clearly articulated vision of the e-knowledge future provides vision pull that enables enterprises to use evolutionary, expeditionary initiatives to eventually achieve truly transformative outcomes.