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Of Tools, Human Beings and SKIERs

C.J. Kuelzow
Zybic, Inc.
New York, New York, USA

At Zybic we are fascinated with how people develop useful tools* to help themselves accomplish things. 

With study we discovered that throughout the ages, many, many categories of tools have been designed, built and tried. However, while some of them became widely accepted and utilized to great effect, many others quickly fell from favor and were eventually discarded because they:

• Missed the mark.
• Were too difficult or costly to use.
• Solved a problem that no longer existed.
• Were replaced with something markedly better.
• And so on …

Ok, some things people create work out well while other things don’t. No big news here. But we still are left wondering why some kinds of tools are held dear, while many others just sit around collecting dust. Are there any common threads in approach or function that separates the successful tools from all of the others?

Well it turns out that the tools that we highly value, do share some fundamental attributes. Specifically, they are the ones that among other things best conform to our uniquely human attributes, expectations and needs. Widely embraced tools usually:

• Demand only enough structure to protect their effectiveness.
• Don’t place “un-natural” demands on their human user community.
• Are sensitive and conforming to uniquely human expectations, preferences and wiring.
• Only draw on us when it is the only practical way to support their ability to deliver their value.
• And so on …

On the other hand, tools that force unnecessary physical or mental accommodations from their human masters, often fail to be highly valued or broadly utilized. 

A universal truth that transcends time and technology is that tools that are built considering “human factors” have the best chance of becoming a valuable aid to our collective efforts. History demonstrates that our best tools are the ones that fit us well while avoiding placing unnecessary and/or “un-natural” demands on us. That is why our cars, hammers, toilets, spreadsheets, kitchens, universities - all look and function as they do. While a member of any successful tool category may have some unique attributes, overall every successful one has been shaped such that it is sensitive and conforming to “human factors”. 

For example, isn’t that why we all have found word processors to be great for producing letters and all sorts of written documents? What could be better than creating a virtual document in a WYSIWYG environment only printing out the hard copy when we are completely satisfied with it? Who wants to return to setting block type or using the typewriter and Whiteout? Nobody, except perhaps you Luddites who still adore the little wheel eraser with the brush on the end!

And when we need to do things with numbers, haven’t spreadsheets proven themselves to be far more efficient than mental gymnastics, paper and pen or a calculator and paper tape? Sure they look odd, but in fact they impose just enough structure to protect their ability to be useful to us.

Accepting that our best tools are the ones that help us in ways that are very natural, flexible and conforming to our needs. Accepting that:

• To manage words we use a word processor
• To manage numbers we use the spreadsheet
• To manage communications we often use e-mail, cell phones
• And so on …

Now what do we use to manage our businesses? Until now we have been cobbling together any number of tools and constructs. And data is everywhere. Information swirls all about us.

Let's think a bit about how we as individuals and employees swim around in our information infrastructure. Specifically, we often need to "search the enterprise" for all relevant information (policies, procedures, processes, facts, etc.) on how to accomplish something or other.

These days we often begin by exploring the corporate portal. While portals can make various, disparate content accessible and hide the complexities of information gathering, they do not "understand" the nature of their individual data sources. Further, they can't refine or package information at a more abstract and useful level. In fact, portals are typically little more than a seductive facade leaving us thirsty for a more complete and useful solution. However, our current information infrastructure is better off with than without them. So as luck would have it, we find at least some of what we were looking for through it.

Then we remember that there are public folders somewhere on the LAN. While they appear to contain a tremendous amount of information, to get anything out of them requires users to have a fair amount of knowledge about their structure. We have floundered around in there before, but still it may be worth some of our time. We probe, but it is hit and miss and we come up a little short.

Finally, we employ a local search engine that perhaps has indexed the corporate portal and fileserver on the LAN. To our surprise, our search returns many "hits". However, surprise leads to disappointment when we realize that what we get back is mostly "noise"- matches that do not contain the information we are looking for - just a meaningless jumble of irrelevant links. This happens because the search engine is "dumb" - it doesn't understand the entities or the relationships between the various information sources. All it is capable of are word and pattern matching. While the syntax matched, the semantics were all wrong.

Frustrated, we soon find ourselves enlisting the help of others. So we make a few directed e-mails or telephone calls - seeing if we can convince them to join with us in our quest. Hopefully, one or two of them will supply the missing information or at least tell us where the silos are. If they do, we should soon have all of the pieces we need to set out and accomplish what we originally wanted to get done.

It is important to note that all of these activities have added no value. They are wasted effort. They are added costs.

Who wouldn't rather avoid all this waste? Why can't we just search and browse through a single location to find all of this information? What currently drives this outcome? Follows some key factors:

• Information is in many forms and is useful in many contexts.
• Information is located and managed in many different places.
• Relationships are not easily created/maintained across these separate information sources thus making it difficult or impossible to navigate easily across this information.
• There is no common information model for conceptual unity.
• And so on

To solve these problems we need to develop and adopt an "Ideal Universal Information Model" that will address these current information infrastructure limitations, be well received and ultimately return a much higher value.

Zybic has done just that. We have created something called a SKIER. That acronym stands for a Structured Key Information Enterprise Repository. The SKIER paradigm provides a powerful and natural way to support any enterprise. Further, it conforms to our human factors so like other important and useful tools it imposes only enough structure needed make it an effective - yet attractive and embraceable construct.

Zybic used the SKIER standard to create their software product called Zybic Enterprise (ZE).  ZE is a tool that helps any organization be far more efficient, competitive and profitable since it packages, protects, promotes and compounds the value returned on all routine activities.

Zybic Enterprise is deeply synchronized with fundamental human factors. It is naturally a tool that everyone can shape and use to their benefit because it is built from the ground-up to support, not burden them. 

* We use the term “tools” to group together all of our supportive devices, physical and intellectual constructs.

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