Notes from 47th International STC Conference
Orlando, Florida, May 21-24, 2000

Keynote Address: The Knowledge Revolution

Thomas M. Koulopoulos

Koulopoulos is professor of knowledge management at the Boston College Wallace E. Carroll Graduate School of Management; the founder and president of the Delphi Group, a consulting firm; and the author of five books. His opinions and commentary have appeared in virtually every national business and trade publication and have been featured on CNBC, CNN, and NPR.

• Koulopoulos started his presentation by having everyone in the audience of 2,400 stand up and give his/her nearest neighbor a big bear hug. It was surprisingly effective. In fact, in a few cases, he had trouble getting folks to move on to the next step--listening to his presentation!
• Technical communicators are a key contributing group to the New Economy.
• Koulopoulos was once in a conversation with Peter Drucker concerning the origins of the Knowledge Revolution. Hoping to hold his own with the learned listener, Koulopoulos ventured his theory: computers. "It is NOT about computers," Drucker replied dryly. "The reason is World War II." Drucker characteristically offered no further explanation; he left it to Koulopoulos to figure out what he meant. The presenter later concluded Drucker was referring to the GI Bill, which opened the window of higher education to millions of American servicemen and women. Education brought the knowledge; computers are merely a means of managing that knowledge.
• That, of course, is where technical communicators come into the picture. Our job, more and more, is knowledge management. We add value, we organize, we archive, we retrieve.
• "Technical communicators are the DNA of economic evolution." We will design the future.
• The Knowledge Explosion is approaching the upward turn on a J-curve that will shortly soar into the stratosphere. Managing this will be key to our role in the New Millennium.
• Connectivity epitomizes our age; the Web has linked the planet. Not all connections are good connections. Technical communicators guide connections.
• Koulopoulos offered two ice-breaking gag slides:
   
• A photo of a device that affixes a laptop computer to the steering wheel of an automobile. The laptop completely obscures the driver's view out the front window. The caption: "Use whenever safely parked." Duh...
• The E-holster. Designed for the cell phone-, Palm Pilot-wielding Cyber-gunslinger. Seriously...see for yourself: http://www.eholster.com.
  
  
• The 3 major sources of economic activity are agribusiness, industry, and knowledge. Industry surpassed agribusiness about a century ago. Knowledge has now outstripped industry. The implications for our profession are overwhelming.
• The Web has greatly reduced the time it takes to get information to people. Using the time it takes to get a given piece of information to 50 million people as a unit of measure, the speaker displayed a bar graph that showed how each successive breakthrough in communications technology (printing press, telephone, radio, TV, Web) has reduced the time it takes to reach the target group. However, when he showed another series of bars tracking the world's population growth in parallel, it was largely offsetting; i.e., there are so many more people to communicate with, the speed gains have been largely offset by population growth. The only two times when a breakthrough in communication technology has created a net increase in the speed of reaching the world population with information occurred with the printing press and the Worldwide Web--and the impact of the latter has already been greater, in percentage terms. Very thought-provoking.
• "The half-life of what you know is forever getting shorter." Knowledge obsolescence will be an increasing challenge for technical communicators.
• In an Age of Discontinuity, how to interact meaningfully falls directly within the realm of technical communication.
• Learning to Forget: For example, on the Titanic, they did everything right after they spotted the iceberg, but it was too late for a ship that size to stop its momentum. The procedures would have worked for any smaller ship, but not for the Titanic. Koulopoulos showed a slide from the original Titanic movie (not the Leonardo DiCaprio version) freeze-framing the terrified expression of the first mate as the ship closed in on the iceberg despite the alacrity of the crew's reaction. Koulopoulos said, "Look into those eyes. Do you see the look of management?" That drew an appreciative laugh from an audience that is well-accustomed to dealing with the consequences of crisis management when it comes to publication deadlines!
  
  
• The Knowledge Chain. Consists of 4 quadrants, the cells created by a small table with Internal and External as the two columns and Awareness and Responsiveness as the 2 rows. The ability to bridge the resulting cells is key to business success; i.e., the ability to convey technical communication to a broad audience is key to successful marketing.
• Transistor radios were greeted with skepticism, yet they were a major success.
• The same kind of skepticism greeted the first "Walkman" portable personal sound systems, yet they too have been a commercial blockbuster.
• Gillette deliberately undercut its own Sensor Excel safety razor that had an unprecedented 72% market share with the Mach 3 (the idea being that if they didn't do it to themselves, Schick or somebody else would do it to them).
• Successful businesses market multiple products in the same line at varying stages in the life cycle. Some are in the "profit zone"; others are still building or waning. The idea is to always have something that is making money. For technical communicators, it causes a need to simultaneously support multiple products, some of which are competing with each other.
• Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This intriguing site, available from the University of California at Berkeley, lets viewers actually scan through unique bits of the cosmic electromagnetic datastream, searching for repetitive patterns in radio waves that might indicate the presence of intelligence life elsewhere in the universe. Each log-on is registered, so the person who ultimately discovers ET will be recognized!
• It is important to enfranchise users in the knowledge process. Technical communicators are the experts, but it is the users' knowledge. They must be actively involved in the process.
• Koulopoulos sees the desktop of the future as object-based and much less compartmentalized, more along the lines of artificial intelligence.
• Desktops like this will contain portals to various archives, functions, and utilities driven by user requests ("I need a document...I need it printed...I need it distributed...").
• The Web is an electronic syndicate of knowledge, traversible over not only distance, but time. Virtually unlimited digital archiving will allow the Web to be searched not only in its present form, but at any time in the past, thereby enabling companies to detect marketing trends and parlay them to their business advantage.
• Vortal = a vertical portal into a world of cyber-based knowledge.
• "Financial markets, employment, education all are defying predictable behavior. They are failing us. Somewhere between the apparently limitless opportunity and the terror of being left behind, we struggle to redefine the rules, while plummeting towards some new unknown."
• In the "free fall" of the Knowledge Explosion, technical communication is the parachute. Technical communicators help people deal with the complexity and velocity of knowledge by bringing it to them in terms they can understand, which meet their needs.
• NASDAQ made instant millionaires and instant bankruptcies. Knowledge is becoming just as volatile as the stocks of the Internet companies that traffic in it!
• To the traditional axes of supply and demand, Koulopoulos adds a new measure called liquidity--an accelerant. How fast can you create a supply to meet a demand? Create the demand itself?
• Vortals will allow Web-based creation of entire vertically integrated lines of business, including resource acquisition, capital investment, financing, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution--all in less than 24 hours--in response to a rapid-breaking marketing opportunity.
• The world community is changing, and the Web is becoming a major factor in that change.
• "Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent entity on the planet." --Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil envisions evolution to some cybernetic organism that will replace Homo Sapiens as the dominant life form on earth.
• Koulopoulos disagrees, citing Matatma Gandhi: "There is more to life than increasing speed."
• Yet speed is, in fact, ever increasing, and we must deal with it. One thing is certain--technical communicators will be in the thick of the fray.