I’ve heard a good number of sermon’s in my time and even delivered a few, a classic device is for the reverend one to stand at the front and say ‘I looked up the word ‘Hope’ in the Oxford dictionary and it said…’ etc. As I stand before my congregation of Exec MBA students I wish that describing Information Management was as straight forward as simple subjects such as hope, justice, poverty and omnipotence. But alas the words keep changing their meaning making hard work keeping my own mental information management glossary in place.
Terms causing some trouble to explain on the MBA module this week are ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), intranets and CRM (Customer Relationship Management Systems).
Intranets are perhaps the key illustration of the problem, Francis Muir teaches this part of the module and he and I also allude to them in an undergraduate E-Commerce module. Originally an intranet was a little private slice of the network based on TCP/IP technologies. It did much the same type of thing as groupware technologies such as Lotus Notes that back in the 90’s were due to take over the world. However over time it has all got a lot woollier. The sort of things that intranet’s do have become packaged as a set of services and sold as either bits of software or as Internet services. So instead we have to think about an intranet not as a bit of IT Infrastructure with services delivered over it but as a set of services available from who knows where. All very well, but this process happens over time and apart from the hassle of updating the lecture notes every year during the transition stage it makes the lecturer seem vague. For students tackling this in their assignments I have suggested that the word ‘Portal’ is now a better description of what they need than intranet but that term is slipping around the glossary as well.
A similar problem has occurred in the world of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in lively discussion with my students. It is easy to see chat a CRM is when it is represented by a lump of business application. But really it stretches beyond the application to be a whole block of capability predicated by having a core set of corporate systems that are basically on top of everything and then some kind of CRM system that adds some functionality veneer on top to marshal all communication with the punters. But then I get the question from one of my students from a housing association that if there core system handles customer interactions is it essentially a CRM system among other things. This is where it becomes more about a view of systems as a whole rather than as components.
Even trickier in terms of movement is the question what is an ERP. Historically I understand that ERP’s came from an integration of sales, logistics and other back office systems in large corporations. I tend to describe them as being monolithic based on a single logical database. But of course the term ERP being successful has been lavished around all other the place. I tend to contrast for students the ERP approach to the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) approach to building the corporate backbone of systems, but then you are in a continuum. The implied vagueness confuses students of course. The question then comes that if the CRM system comes from the same supplier as the ERP system then is it really part of the ERP. The answer to this in my mind is to do with whether they are based on the same logical database and hence integrated at the data level or whether they integrate at the services level. But then it becomes a technical issue and beyond the scope of my MBA crowd to know or care about the difference.
These major terms change meaning perhaps over a 5 or 10 year period. However corporate scale businesses probably hold onto their core systems for longer than that. So if my student is discussing what an intranet is in her company then it can have a whole slew of possible meanings most of which can be wrong for the person sitting next to them.
Makes me wonder how my clever library oriented colleagues with their fancy semantic web ideas are coping with the rapid change of meaning of Information Systems words over time.
In response to your question Johnny, the short answer is: "not particularly well!" Haha!
ReplyDeleteIt is an almost intractable issue for the Semantic Web; however, in some ways it is not particularly new. Many Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) (such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading schemes, etc.) have had to wrestle with this issue in the past but have done so in a non-committal manner. It is only now – with the advent of global information retrieval systems and repositories - that this issue has really come home to roost. Where meaning has been tracked successfully, it has been in concept schemes that employ sophisticated notation, essentially functioning as a unique identifier. By employing this method, for example, it is possible to track the meaning of DDC captions over time because the notation remains constant for that concept irrespective of the label that is used to describe it. It was by using a similar method that Powell et al were able to track meaning over time in the Unified Medical Language System metathesaurus (see the paper – PDF). This was a particularly good case study as medical semantics are arguably even more transient than those in technology affiliated circles!
A similar principle is being employed in the Semantic Web community. Every concept - indeed, every 'thing' - on the Semantic Web has to be identifiable using a URI. Great! This should theoretically make things much easier; but not necessarily in practice. The conceptual and technical models necessary to adequately address these issues in a less controlled environment (i.e. the web vs. standalone KOS) are still insufficent.
Still, Joseph Tennis (an active KOS-head) has probably been most active in the LIS-cum-Semantic Web community. He has explored "Problems in Modeling Concept Change in SKOS" (SKOS being a RDF specification for Knowledge Organization Systems) and scheme versioning on the web. But I think it's a lonely world for him and there is a desperate need for more work. In short, it's all extremely interesting stuff!!!
Coincidentally enough, some ex-colleagues and I submitted a research proposal to the EU requesting funds for a gigantic project (hence my familiarity with some of the literature). The project straddled a variety of research areas, but better exploring the tracking of meaning over time was one of those areas. The EU bureaucratic machine is still trundling along and an outcome of the peer review process has yet to be announced (to my knowledge). In any case I wouldn't get to work on it anymore now that I've left!
Tinkerty tonk!