The Knowledge Organization

A single generic hierarchical network is capable of holding all the knowledge of an organization. So why aren’t these networks common?

💎 Structured and unstructured knowledge is mixed. You set feature priority, but you also write specs. You advance deals through a pipeline, but also take meeting notes. Hopefully, digital whiteboards and interactive embeds will also be welcome — one day 🤞.

Most single-purpose work management tools are, basically, hierarchical networks. Tool vendors understand they need the best of all worlds to foster collaboration.

Is there a way to combine structured and unstructured knowledge, vertical and horizontal connections?

💎 The structure is flexible. The knowledge architect is free to create as many or as few tables as needed and connect them in the way it makes sense to the particular organization. As organization evolves, she creates more tables and adds more relations.

In a relational database, both vertical and horizontal connections are present through one-to-many and many-to-many relations. Each table has its own attributes making home for structured data.

So we need both horizontal and vertical connections as well as the ability to handle structured data. Sounds pretty much like…

💩 Repeatable processes are undiscoverable. Since there are no required (or even desired) attributes and relations, there is nothing to nudge folks into a predictable workflow. You have to explain each newcomer that “we decompose Epic into Stories, estimate these Stories, and plan into Sprints” — a flat network cannot guide them.

💩 Visualizations are limited. Most vizualizations rely on structured data — so forget about a Kanban board with swimlanes, an event calendar, a gantt chart, or a hierarchical list.