Engineers are problem solvers and today, they have some pretty
amazing tools to help them with that
problem solving. Here’s an example
from a recent trip.
I went to a station to refill a rental
car with gas before returning it to the
agency. As usual, I guessed the wrong
side for the gas tank and had to circle
around to put the car at the right angle
to pump the gas. I couldn’t figure out
where the latch to open the gas cap
was located, and there was no owner’s
manual in the glove box to help.
On my smart phone, I did a quick
Google search by voice command using
the car make, model and “gas tank
door latch” as keywords. The results
were an online forum with my answer:
the door was latched magnetically and
required a gentle push to open. This
simple voice search saved me 5 to 10
minutes of hunting around for a nonexistent latch and a lot of frustration.
These searches from our PCs,
phones, tablets and other devices help
us solve problems quickly and painlessly every day. Google and the other
search engines, along with the right
selection and number of keywords,
often help us get an answer to a problem in front of us. Although it’s not
foolproof, most times, these methods of
finding what we need work great.
IN THE INBOX
For businesses, an important issue
today with searching is that a lot of
wisdom is trapped in email inboxes and
“sent items” folders. Desktop indexing
and search software such as the search
built into PC operating systems or
desktop search applications can find
42 | Valve MAGAZINE
Solving the Problems in Front of You
some information. But such tools don’t
help us with the information that hasn’t reached our inboxes.
Different approaches ranging from
content management systems to blogs,
wikis, online collaboration and community software are being tried as
search destinations with varying
degrees of success. The key element to
that success seems to be the number of
people willing to participate in each
approach and the community that naturally forms from this participation.
Metcalfe’s Law states that: “The
value of a telecommunications network
is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system
(n2).” Robert Metcalfe, who is responsible for that principle, also offered this:
…a more insightful and, I think,
important contribution to the conversation — that to understand the
value of a social network we need to
consider not just the number of users
but also the affinity between the
members of the network.
My take on this is that the fastest
path to the information you need is to
solve the problem in front of you. If a
Google search or question posed to
your immediate colleague does not
yield a quick answer, you should try
your social network. That is, provided
you’ve built this network to sufficient
size to realize the exponential effects
described by Metcalfe’s Law.
