Is P2P KM and DW's breakout technology?
P2P (Peer to Peer technology like napster) may
prove a genuine breakthrough in
the use of technology in knowledge management efforts. A fundamental problem with computing and knowledge management has always been that people either flat out don't want to share information ("I'm important because I have control over this information") or have no real incentive to share information ("I've got enough to do without filling out more forms"). No technology can change such fundamental social attitudes, yet collaborative technologies have always expected that such issues can be minimized, if not overcome. In a sense, they could if an organization had everyone work with a common data repository (eg dumb terminals on a mainframe), allowing all data to be indexed, mined or what have you. But, that has been well proven a highly inefficient use of computing resources in terms or ad-hoc business operations (about 90% of the activity in any business), and something that business users (be they individuals or departments) have, for good reason, rebelled against. Server based collaborative technologies (e.g.
Lotus Notes and
Microsoft Exchange or
Intraspect and
eRoom) address the problem by accepting that only a subset of an organization's information can be maintained in a central repository and focus on making that repository as efficient and accessible as possible.
P2P collaborative technologies (e.g.
NextPage), however, have the potential to walk right over the limitations of centralized computing cycles and storage. With P2P it is feasible that
all organizational information is available for indexing and mining, regardless of the social proclivities of individuals, and that the computing power needed to do this can be efficiently distributed throughout the organization.
Given this, might not P2P, (think XML here too), allow for more efficient and encompassing data warehousing within an organization too?
