This was inspired by Harold Wilenski's book, Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry), and Robert Steele's growing awareness that what passes for “Knowledge Management” is nothing more than internal data mining. Augmented by an understanding of collaboration networks and by the growing but still immature field of commercial intelligence, the chart took shape rather quickly.
Not anticipated, but now consistent with both the strategic direction of the Earth Intelligence Network, and the reality of how cell phones rather than laptops are the device of choice for the poor, was the seminal role of the cell phone as the device of choice for achieving organizational intelligence.
It can be useful placed side by side with Nova Spivak's Meta-Web illustration to see a convergence of the technical-centered (Spivak) and the human-centered (Steele).