Search Done Right

Last week, I attended the 2009 Knowledge Management Conference hosted by the 1105 Government Information Group. The conference was focused around empowering government agencies to build out their knowledge management practices for improved knowledge transfer and decision making.  (All presentations are available for download here.)

The most interesting talk at the conference for me was the keynote by General Peter Chiarelli the U.S. Army’s vice chief of staff. The discussion focused on the concept of the “strategic corporal.”  In his talk, Chiarelli stated that:

“The ’strategic corporal’ is a reality. We’ve moved beyond the mantra that every soldier is a scout. Now every soldier is an intelligence asset. What we do to empower that corporal will create more strategic advantage than anything I know.”

The idea was that the U.S. Army is fighting a new kind of war – one where information is power. He stressed that as important as it is to collect knowledge, it is equally important to disseminate that information. There is not always enough time to wait for top-down orders. Often it is soldier out in the field who needs to make a life or death decision. Soldiers need access to knowledge from previous trainings, fellow soldiers and past experiences to make game-changing moves on the ground in matter of minutes. 

Not only was Chiarelli’s analogy relevant for the government and military, but I also found it pertained equally to corporations. Enterprises always talk about empowering employees to make decisions to give the company more agility. As a broader community is given more authority, it becomes even more critical to provide members with greater knowledge. Not only do they need access to information, but the knowledge they discover must be complete and readily available.

I couldn’t help but ask myself if the general was fundamentally talking about a search problem. In the past, wars were fought by arming soldiers with combat gear. But what if the weapon of the modern war was a search box? Think about it. The search box becomes soldiers’ gateway to knowledge on-demand, empowering them to make the right decision quickly. In the military this might mean they are saving lives. In a corporation it could mean an engineer is saving the company millions by identifying a design flaw before it is sent to the production line.

We’ve always said that information is power. It seems that’s more true now that ever before.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 11:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.