In Star Trek, the Borg are always presented as a "bad" entity, seeking to remove the individuality from people and force them to become a part of their "collective" entity. For years there have even been jokes in technology about people going to work for Microsoft and becoming "assimilated" into the culture in Redmond.
When I ran across this article recently, it reminded me of the Borg. The article talks about tapping the disparate knowledge and wisdom of employees to solve problems and innovate inside companies. It's an interesting idea, and one that I think is good for data professionals.
The idea of sharing knowledge, collaborating, and somehow getting information moving between people can only be good for jobs dealing with data. Somehow finding patterns and correlations between the work various people are doing, or helping them to find those projects they are interested in, is a perfect job for SQL Server. All those enhancements to the BI stack, especially those coming out in SQL Server 2008 R2, would be a great platform on which to possibly correlate information from various sources and use it to solicit more ideas and feedback from groups.
I think this is an interesting area of research that will grow in the future. It's similar to the ideas talked about in the MyLifeBits project and Total Recall. It's an area that might be exciting for some of the SQL Server developers out there, and might provide lots of jobs in the future for those talented in this area.
Steve Jones
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