Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments. What was that paraphrased sentiment: Life sucks and then you die?!

Actually, seriously ….

Let me know if you post something longer on your own blog or elsewhere on this topic. In general, I think the institution of the “corporation” deserves inspection in its own right, and we may also be passing its zenith as an organizational mode for human activity.

I’ve been working virtually now since 1988 (19 years!), which labelled me in the early years as a “teleworker” or “telecommuter” or “unusual” (I actually was invited to speak at numerous conferences years ago on what it was like to work from home!) (all of which meant I was ill suited for the corporate life in any case!).

I now see ads for jobs touting virtual and global and the rest. So, perhaps some of your concerns about the “corporate” may be temporal and liable to similar massive shifts as in past history, which after some indigestion have often proved generally to the good.

Keep in touch, Mike

First of all, thanks for writing so prolifically about the Semantic Web in your blog. Not only have I enjoyed following your journey, I always learned something along the way.

In regard to this recent post, I could not agree more with your postulating about the reality of those key inflection points on the graph. You write within the context of the macro economic picture over the long term. I would posit to you that there is the analog when one applies the same thinking to the corporate world. Unfortunately, over the course of my consulting career I formed the opinion that IT today is very much undervalued by people running businesses. Perhaps it is attitudes that have to change first before a firm can realize similar exponential growth from information. In my experience every once in awhile smaller firms seem to be able to execute on information and knowledge of actionable intelligence better because they are more agile, lean and highly competitive. When I started my career in 1972 attitudes were much different. I think they started changing for the worse with dawn of the PC Computer to the masses.

In the larger corporate scenes people seem to think the IT/IS stuff is simply a necessary evil. And in fact where I work, many people will not use their email believe it or not. If IT or the management of knowledge was important enough for executives in their annual strategic planning, they would not outsource which in my opinion further devalues the net worth of a firms information assets. It is not a matter of saving labor costs on programmers. Your subject matter experts, engineers, scientists all reside within your organization and they are the people who will construct ontologies or design systems around manufacturing and processes. I am not certain you can ever commoditize these attributes because these are the vectors of innovation within our own business and knowledge domains.

The entire IT organization in many firms are staffed with generalists and they have no hope of developing data and information into useful knowledge assets as we think of them in the Semantic Web setting. Take for instance Pharma firms, the biggest percentage of them are not producing cutting edge knowledge management tools, systems, ontologies, etc. that anybody would write home about. Maybe I live a shelterd life, but I certainly have not found this to be the case where I work. Most of this cutting edge technology as you know is blooming from many of our academic institutions. See

http://www.ispe.org/page.ww?section=Journal+of+Pharmaceutical+Innovation&name=Toward+intelligent+decision+support+for+pharmaceutical+product+development

If what you are saying about the real driver of economic growth is human knowledge leading to innovation, a corporation if ever there comes a day of maturity about going from being an IT or MIS mentality to capitalizing on knowledge, only then will we see exceptional economic performances from the large corporate entities which will translate into the macro picture and another blip on the graph. In the meantime, we are stagnated with a host of applications in the pharma area such as LIMS, Trackwise, SAP, eDoc, eRoom to name a few that are so Semantic unfriendly toward the very concepts you elicit in your writings. We exchange unstructured documents, emails, and chase distributed data to the point where it is getting very difficult to develop a new product, manufacture under licensure and bring it to market at reasonable prices. I will get off my minor musical chord now.

Anyway, great article! Keep up the good work.

Kind Regards,

John Wubbel