Cobb

Augh, man, you're killing me!

I made the same connection between Nash and Boyd. (I have a comment on your other Boyd post, below. The comment has some links you may like.)

There's another person who talked about synthesis--Robert Heinlein. (He's got several comments in his writings about it.) That's where I started thinking about what Boyd calls "building snowmobiles"--connecting things that you wouldn't think were connected to get something new.

I married a librarian, but that didn't help--look at all this great data, but how is it connected? How is it linked? How can you use one observation to get something completely different, and how do you accelerate that process? How do you put image transforms and obscure wavelet theory together to get FWTs?

Augh!

Thanks a lot Chap. Great stuff you've got there. Actually, this is the point at which I should give voice to one of the 'obvious' principles upon which I have based my career, which is the accelleration of the business cycle.

It was back in the late 80s I was first attracted to the business ove business computing. My original goal was to be a 'rocket scientist'; go to NYC and build software systems for Wall Street. I didn't make that cut, but at Xerox I became focused on the business decision cycle. It was the perfect time to be there. David Kearns was re-structureing the entire way business decisions were made in the company via his Leadership Through Quality initiative (engineered by McKinsey, inspired by Demming), the Xerox Systems Group where I worked, (sorta) led by Bob Adams was embarking on rearranging the architecture of front-office computing. I was on the ground trying to get managers to use computers (after John Seely Brown) in a weak-AI capacity. Basically the paradigm was augmentation.

Since I was working in an IT department attached to a finance organization, I understood what goes on as people struggle and fight to close the books on a month, especially where there are multiple organizations using disparate GL systems. So I heard month in and month out how cool it would be if managers could see their own numbers in the ways they largely do now. (This was 1986 - in the days before Microsoft Excel or the '486).

Then this German cat named Kurt Fey, the most evil scientist type I ever met in my life, reminded me of Wall Street, in between his harrangues about everyone's incompetence and his obsession with Value Line. This was about the time that Edgar was just beginning to accept some sort of electronic submission of 10-Qs. The brain went click, and I suddenly understood what was so brilliant about the businesses like Reuters. I forget the name of the company headquartered in Culver City that first introduced pagers to let people eyeball stock tickers.

By '92 corporations finally realized that client-server was going to work. But I had already seen the future, with Wallstreet analysts and their hardwired Bloomberg machines representing the leading edge of near-realtime analysis of businesses abstracted to their key performance indicators. Banking and finance was next. I talked to some actuaries who wanted huge multidimensional analysis beyond what was available - ahh those Tillinghast Towers Perrin boys - ahead of their time.

Anyway, the bottom line is that many years before the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, technologists and businessfolks had seen the power of accellerating the accuracy and responsiveness of systems designed to 'informate' their organizations and seeing how that would give them a competitive advantage.

Right now I'm a bottom feeder doing one-man systems in the low end of the business waiting for the paradigm of real-time distributed grid computing and localized functional dynamic KPIs to take us to the next level. It will be more revolutionary than Supply Chain and further enable the virtual corporation, but we have to wait until IT spending cranks up again.

This is great! Turns out I've done a little work in a similar field, the tactical picture for military stuff. I'll post the links and so forth on my blog, since the conversation's long.

Unless you object, I'll add a quote from here because this is Good Stuff.

Post away. I've got 400MB more space on my webhosting plan. As Flip Wilson said as Josephine, "Don't fight the feelin' honey."

I haven't heard a Flip Wilson quote in about two decades--I miss the old variety shows, and Flip was goood.

It turned out to be a good post (although I seem to only get comments on other people's cowbell videos and when my car dies). I've got sixth grade ruminations on the Dewey Decimal System, wavelets, stock tickers, you name it.

http://gmapalumni.org/chapomatic/index.php?p=216

There are two really neat ideas in here: (1) how to present information better, and (2) how to get new ideas from connecting things together. I really want to find some systematic research on (2).

To quote Hedley Lamarr from Blazing Saddles, "My mind is aglow with whirling transient nodes of thought, careening through a cosmic vapor of invention."