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Eternal Experts


My mind drifted as I drove in to work on this perfect day.  The sun was shining, birds were chirping and traffic was flowing smoothly.  I tried to imagine what work would be like after the retirement party for Legendary Lee, a fountain of knowledge for all of us over the past two decades.  Lee was involved or led change for the organization; touching everything from internal systems and tools to external innovations to help differentiate us with our customers.  When I was 17 my Father reminded me that nobody was irreplaceable yet on this day I struggled with how questions would be answered tomorrow and who or what would fill this "knowledge void".



As I pulled into the parking lot Influential Irene was sitting in her car, her eyes a bit swollen as if she had been crying. When I was having a tough day, it was Irene who I went to see, she always had this infectious smile that could brighten anyone's day.  Today was different, her and Lee were very close and it was obvious that his retirement was taking a toll.  She is not quite ready to go inside I thought to myself, so I gently tapped on her cars passenger window, hoping that some of my good cheer from this morning would rub off on her.  The door unlocked and in a shaking voice Irene said, please join me Andy.  While I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, two decades of marriage taught me to not say much, just make sure that Irene knew I was there for her if she felt like talking.  As I made my way into the passenger's seat I reached over and stroked her forearm saying, "Lee had a great run".



He is just retiring for crying out loud, I'm not sure why this if affecting me in this way.  Irene continued, Lee and I have been preparing months for this day.  Desperate to shift the conversation to the future, I said "what do you mean by your comment preparing months"?  Irene continued; relevant and immediate access to information, unstructured antidotes and structed knowledge sources, have always been a challenge.  Unstructured antidotes, or what Lee often called "tribal knowledge" is by far the hardest knowledge to share to a broad audience, this information is generally obtained by having a relationship with the person in the know.  Structured knowledge is plentiful, you know those files, presentations, etc. passed out during training and stored in the digital "knowledge library".  Both types of information require requestors to ask the question in exactly the proper way or the results will be inconsistent.  Andy could see that his curiosity was starting to lift Irene's spirits, "Irene very interesting, please tell me more".



Over the years Lee had become increasingly frustrated with the ability to influence and in many cases, convince others that the proposed change would be beneficial.  If all the stars aligned, and everyone could make the connection to their daily routines, we would be in great shape.  However, the last few years increase in opportunities to use new tools, and the almost endless updates and shifts to better tools, have left consumers in a constant state of flux.  Lee knew that our traditional means of communicating and managing knowledge had to adapt to the times or the users would become increasingly frustrated.  About six months ago Lee had a great idea, continued Irene, we need to create an environment where you could ask, in your own words and style, stream of consciousness questions.  This approach, thought Lee, would be a way in which he could share his knowledge long after retirement.  Irene recalled, just as Lee was getting me on board with the concept he proclaimed, "and we will do this with a Conversational BOT"!  What?  A BOT seemed a bit outrageous, wasn't it easier to deploy incremental change and not disruptive change Irene fired back to Lee.  Absolutely, Lee stated in his reassuring and confident manner, yet we will never meet our objective of everyone being continuously informed.



So, Lee and I began our research.  We discovered that these bots (computer-based logical routines and conversational threads) are operating all around us. Sometimes people confuse these bots with sophisticated search algorithms, this is not the area that had any interest to Lee. Instead, the bot, in his mind, can be used to take advantage of and make meaningful the correlation between a multitude of digital systems.  These systems can reside either within or outside of your computing environments.  One of the greatest advantages, which struck me immediately, was the ability to simply carry on a conversation with a person, using natural language. In the background, predicting and guiding the human through bot based responses. Why should anyone be concerned with what system they must enter this… or go to find that?  As we begin to explore the technology, this humanistic conversation based approach, it dawned on us that the possibilities were endless. These underlying algorithms and machine learning routines would consume knowledge and make it available at any time to any person.  You could hear a change in Irene's voice, she realized that today would be bittersweet, Lee's retirement and the release of his replacement, OurBOT.  Computer based BOTs can manage elevated levels of connections in ways that humans cannot; however, make no mistake they will never replace any human.  The swelling in Irene's eyes had diminished and it was time to head inside, we have a retirement party to attend!



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Next post:  from the field to the office

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