SME-sense

As a person who this summer left the ranks of support for projects, I have a constant and urgent need for SME (subject matter expert) information. In general, I have received a lot of help from a lot of people to come close to succeeding. I'm not a newbie - I'm in my 50th yr of IT.

In that short time since I rotated, it appears to me that we are succeeding on the ability of team members to get their jobs done in spite of the system. There is a lot of information stored between team members ears and much information stored on servers. There is no knowledgebase that pulls it all together. Text search as a technology is, if I remember rightly, about about 5 decades old. Without information organization - a publishing event - one is constantly searching for what which someone else just searched for.

Silos of information have high local optimization of information storage, retrieval and usage. When tearing them down, there needs to be a replacement for the local community.

Going back to the movie Roots, when Alex Hailey found his ancestor in the memory of a local "library" resource, he wrote down the bits and pieces he wanted. Unless others did the same, it was lost when the resource died. Recording the memory would make it serially reusable. Publishing it, in the true sense, requires it to be organized - a rewarding task that only pays off other than in the short term.