[Sigia-l] Google vs. Knowledge Management

[John McCrory]

According to a brief softball story in Information Week, the city of San
Diego has come to "know what it knows" by using a single Google server with
a license to search an index of up to 150,000 documents -- all for just
$23,000. In contrast, when they asked Verity for advice, the company
suggested, as Cory Doctorow put it on BoingBoing, they "proposed a much more
expensive 'solution' that involved creating an explicit taxonomy and then
manually tagging all the city's docs within it. In other words, the
competition's pitch is, "'First, tell us everything you have, then we'll
tell you what you've got.'" 

Article: City Ogles Google Impact 
The city of San Diego's search appliance left employees and citizens
hanging. Then it turned to Google.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030122S0010 [found via
boingboing.net]

All the discussion on this list about knowledge management- and content
management-related IA topics (classification, e.g.) is often quite
interesting to me, but in my capacity at a 200-employee nonprofit
organization I know I will never have the time or the budget to invest in
such sophisticated and expensive solutions. Neither will a lot of people at
all kinds of organizations large and small.

Sometimes I think a cheap alternative such as a "Google" for our network
would a "good enough" solution. Other times I think that would just continue
to encourage employees to manage their documents sloppily, without any
conventions or reason. And sometimes I wonder if Google's approach is a
first step towards a rational method of managing knowledge and content.

Anyway, I thought the article would be of interest.

     John McCrory, Webmaster 
     Vera Institute of Justice
     http://www.vera.org/