The Center for Semantic Excellence researches the forces at work in single organizations as well as in families of organizations in a domain — from the perspective of an impartial third party with a deep understanding of economics, social dynamics, and key performance indicators.
Members of the CSE have conducted extensive analyses of complex socio-economic situations, developed and implemented ground-breaking surveys and reports in knowledge management, and applied revolutionary, patented technology to market acceptance of solutions and messages.
Our group includes the creator of the term “Y2K,” another whose company invented the search architecture driving Google, a third who’s deeply connected with knowledge and semantics as a discipline, and others who have done significant work in situation awareness and action learning, failure analysis, social intent and effectiveness assessment, multi-regional economic analysis, and institutional strengthening. We decided to put our heads together and make a difference.
We’re interested in advancing leading edge
thought for operational processes, organizational design, and next-phase strategic semantics technology in economic activities characterized
by “wicked problems”— that is, problems that are chronic and resistant. These activities are unusual in that they include entire major
industries as interacting players, and they present iterative behaviors with stable but arguably sub-optimal equilibria. Introducing
change resembles adjusting fitted stones in an arch.
The strength of our research approach lies in our ability to understand, describe, and quantify the full spectrum of factors that influence real-worldsocio-economic processes. Our initial focus has two components. One thrust aims at modifying structural information tools and capabilities in “wicked-problem” sectors, where our founding members have considerable experience, such as healthcare, education, new media, financial services, and securities markets and regulation. The other thrust addresses the development of increased cooperation among cross-cutting industry participants as an outgrowth of modified information tools and behaviors in “wicked-problem” sectors. We believe our unique approach breaks barriers to effectiveness in these and other information-rich activities, especially those with public and private facets.
At the core, we address the critical overlap across volume, complexity, and speed as knowledge sources multiply. When markets, institutions, and enterprises become more complex and multi-faceted, knowledge sources become increasingly dense. The density itself elicits information intermediaries to mobilize timely, actionable knowledge needed by enterprises. However, the intermediaries become another layer in the workplace. This creates professional, semantic, and cultural barriers to effective system-wide performance because enterprises cannot get information in and out of their operating functions with the speed and detail needed to run all their processes.
We see non-organic approaches to “wicked” scenarios as akin to the central-control problem that hobbled five-year plans in Russia for managing its complex continental economy: There was too much going on to run things from the top. At the enterprise level, people need newly conceived tools to let them act like in-house knowledge intrapreneurs to bridge internal-external knowledge mobilization gaps and make things work. The metaphor for enabled knowledge intrapreneurs in an enterprise is the dynamics of enterprises themselves in a market economy (“co-opetition”).
One goal is to research the creation of new, seamless markets for the granular meaning inherent within dense knowledge. By serving as information-framers and interpreters, we enable workers to become information intrapreneurs for their employers within and across actionable knowledge. This redefines knowledge work itself to enable enterprise-wide gains in cst, access, quality, and innovation — and opens the way to significant structural improvements in multi-sector co-opetition.
Our founding members have had hands-on success in pursuing this strategy in several sectors, including financial services, healthcare, and higher education. Future research encompasses human resource maangement, transportation, environment, energy, manufacturing, and other information-rich areas. Member projects have included work with Northeastern, Tufts, the Berklee School of Music, MIT, the Boston Consortium for Higher Education, Children’s Hospital (Boston), SUNY Binghamton, NextStage Evolution, and the US and Philippine SECs.