The human expertise dimension

by Art Murray

If you’re like most knowledge workers, you have access to overwhelming amounts of information. Long rows and columns of numbers. Red vs. blue maps. Digital dashboards. Bar charts. Pie charts. Pinwheels. Ferris wheels. You name it.

On more than one occasion, you’ve probably asked yourself, "I have all this information. Now what?"

As knowledge workers, we are reaching the point where we really don't need any more information (just like I really don't need any more channels on my satellite dish). What we need is expertise. Help. Advice. Guidance. Answers to the question, "Now what?"

This is what I call the human expertise dimension. And in many information systems, it’s sorely lacking.

Here’s an example. You go to your favorite search engine, and enter a string of carefully constructed keywords. You get back something like 50,000 hits, and an implied: “Good luck figuring it all out.” (Remember the movie Absence of Malice, where a truckload of subpoenaed documents gets dropped off at the defense counsel’s office, the night before the trial?)

Search engines, with one blank text field, are basically asking: “What are you looking for?” The problem is, most of the time we don’t know what we’re looking for. So we scroll, and refine, scroll and refine, until we either find what we’re looking for, or give up. (About 18% of all searches are unsuccessful).

Instead, wouldn’t it be great if you had a system that would act as an expert advisor, rather than an information dump truck? The system would spend a minute or two engaging you in a brief consultation. Instead of asking, “What are you looking for?” It would ask: “Who are you? What result are you looking for? Are you a novice or an expert? An executive or a practitioner? How much time do you have?”

The solution is to provide an intelligent “layer” which sits on top of the data and information layers. In the next nugget, we will show what this layer consists of.