On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 20:33:06 -0500, Mike Shaw <techsupp...@quickref.com> wrote: >Knowledge Center is IT from now on, boys and girls. > >We're not happy about it either.
There are a lot of bytes still to go under the bridge. What has happened is some sort of culture shift in the way people (younger than me) *want* to get information. The Knowledge Center (KC) makes some attempt to organize information into task-oriented groupings. The problem is that books themselves aren't really structured (yet) to take advantage of it. Most (System z) manuals are replete with headers to help the reader find and follow the information trail. And those are tied to running headings and footings to make flipping through a book easier. (I find that I still use them when flipping pages in a PDF.) And the books were arranged by topic, not task or discipline. But it all has to go. BookManager drove me crazy with all the hierarchical relationships and little 2-sentence pages. Grrrr!!!. But it showed perfectly how the document was structured. (Eeeewwww! Bad word!) Those same structures are still with us in an environment where you shouldn't have keep clicking or paging (NEXT PREV) to find the info. So KC gets us part of way there, but the books themselves inhibit true success. It makes me think that the next generation of information writers will simply use Wiki-style updates with tags to indicate what type of information it is. Then the Knowledge Vortex will pull it in and shuffle it into all the venues those tags mandate. How we get the well-organized books we have come to know like the backs of our hands out of that is yet to be seen. The KC isn't a library of books. It's a compendium of factoids. And that's what's making everyone (myself included) a bit off balance. I don't do well with Facebook, either. Or IBM Connections. It reminds me of when I learned LISP, a non-procedural language. My mind had difficulty with the concept, not the language itself. New tricks! Arf! Arf! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
