Modernizing the Knowledge Supply Chain

I wrote a blog article a little while ago entitled 'Video Speaks Every Language'. I thought it made a useful point about the difficulty of transmitting technical knowledge across cultural and linguistic borders. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had seen this problem before. Then it hit me. Its just another supply chain.

The Global Supply Chain Analogy

The problems that individuals and companies have in communicating with other languages and other lands are virtually the same challenges that have afflicted the shippers of goods throughout history. If you look at images of previous transportation systems, you will see that nothing really changed over most of human existence. Every shipment was pretty much handled the same way. Stuff was loaded and unloaded and loaded and unloaded. The ships got bigger and faster, trains replaced barges and wagons gave way to trucks, but it was always a laborious, error-prone system as shown in the following images:

Each individual box, bale and bag had to be handled separately, perhaps a dozen times between origin and destination. How many times did a package get lost? How many times was it misplaced? What if there was something valuable or time-sensitive in that package? Tough luck. Think airline bags - but this all changed with the advent of standard containers and specialized handling equipment:

Once pieces are loaded, locked and sealed in a container, they are never touched until they reach their destination. In between, the entire transportation system is optimized to move and store standard 10ft x10ft x 40ft boxes. To the transportation system, their contents are irrelevant. There are no bags to leak, no boxes to break and no bales to spill. Just a standard box that is handled the same efficient way in thousands of terminals and ports around the world.

How important is this innovation? Almost unmeasurable. If standard containers didn't exist, it is doubtful that we would have anything like the current global economy. Walmart and Target could not exist in their current forms. Products in every part of the world would be more expensive and new innovations would arrive much later to the market. The immense choice that consumers enjoy would be greatly reduced. The quality of our goods would probably be lower. Things would not be the same.

The Traditional Knowledge Supply Chain

So how does the remaking of the global supply chain concern issues of knowledge, culture, language or eLearning? Consider the system by which we transmit technical knowledge across distance, culture and language:

This is also a supply chain - with the same problems that have afflicted goods transportation for millenia. This diagram might have described how a Greek trader communicated with a Roman merchant. Each idea is written, interpreted or translated multiple times, often with a poor understanding of the original context or nuance. It's the pre-container goods shipping system applied to technical knowledge. By the time it reaches its destination, the message can be lost, garbled, de-emphasized or distorted - and the shipper may never know. If my technical instructions are translated into Arabic for someone in Morocco to act on them, how can I know that they are correctly conveyed or understood?

But what if we could find a standard shipping container for our ideas and knowledge. What if we could take our technical information, seal it in a box with standard 'dimensions' and send it through a communication system that is optimized to handle that package quickly and efficiently? What if we could track each shipment cheaply and easily? What if we could inspect the contents ourselves after it reaches the destination? Wouldn't that be as revolutionary as global containerization?

A Shipping Container for Ideas?

As I described in this earlier article, iPOV believes that video offers special benefits to the communication of ideas across distance, culture and language. If we use video as part of the communication package, it can retain its integrity across the full communication sequence:

In other words, video is a standard shipping container for knowledge! Video can convey accurate information without words. You can see the power in this YouTube movie: Japanese instructions on how to peel a potato in 2 seconds. Even if you don't speak Japanese, you can probably figure out how to copy their method. There are enough visual cues to remove most of the uncertainty. The words, if anything, just distract and get in the way. In the following examples, a video 'how-to' is delivered in three different language contexts. The video clip remains the same. Even though the accompanying text and commentary traverse the traditional translation process, the information contained in the video was packed and sealed when the video was made. The video portion will always convey the same message and will always act as a contextual check on the accompanying text and commentary. In fact, the text and commentary in this example represent little more than elaborate shipping labels. Try turning the sound off on your computer and watching the clips again.

Printer Maintenance (English)

Printer Maintenance (Chinese Subtitles)

Printer Maintenance (German)

This example makes a strong case for the "video as container" idea. There will be many other types of information that are not as easily packaged in an visual format as this physical procedure. Nonetheless, adding video to any communication will put some fraction of the total message into a package that will guaranteed the contents throughout the journey. Even if most of the message is more easily captured in text, an accompanying video clip will increase the odds that the recipient will put the message in context.

Most of the infrastructure and technology to efficiently handle video is already in place. Many tools exist on the public Internet (e.g., YouTube). Hosts of other tools are being developed by web companies, software vendors and in open source projects. For its part, iPOV has developed and assembled a uniquely comprehensive toolkit that is specifically tailored to speed and facilitate this process, including our Video Translation Transformation and our Video Sharing Portal.

Bottom Line

I believe that our global economy is on the verge of an information revolution that will be as profound as the one that transformed goods transportation in the past 30 years. It will take a while for the opportunity to sink in, but gradually people will discover how much it will pay to explain things in a visual form. Adding an informal video to a technical communication will make it more likely that the message will get through and iPOV is aggressively developing the 'virtual' trucks, trains, ports and cranes to handle this new type of information cargo.