This wiki has been established to support a collaboration between the University of Surrey's Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education (SCEPTrE) and Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge plc. The work will involve evaluating the use of the sensemaker software in researching into educational matters relating to professional and lifewide learning and the student experience.

Introductory seminar June 7th 2010

The Cognitive Edge SenseMaker® Software Suite, Cognitive Edge

The software, fully integrated with a coherent body of formal methods, is the outcome of several years of research into human-based organizational complexity, sensemaking, decision-making, knowledge sharing and narrative by Cognitive Edge. It provides a natural and intuitive approach to gaining multiple perspectives and new insights into complex problems that have hitherto proved intractable for both strategic management methods and software.

The SenseMaker® Software Suite has been harnessed to address complex issues associated with:

Making decisions in inherently complex environments;

Assessing the intelligence available on competitive actors and their strategies;

Developing leaders who can adapt to constant change;

Managing knowledge that is critical to their business; and

Assessing customer satisfaction and employee morale.

White papers on each of these are being made available through the Cognitive Edge website site. A common theme to the above is the use of unstructured data such as organisational narrative, news articles, blog entries, pictures, movies and soundclips, where the detection of weak signals provides greater security and responsiveness to change.

Dave Snowden Founder of Cognitive Edge

The software currently provides the following functionality:

• Narrative Discovery – the creation, indexing, and filtering of sensemaking data units known as SMIs (sensemaking items)
• Mass Narrative Representation (MNR) – a reporting tool providing multiple analyst views, allowing users to identify patterns and detect weak signals in large amounts of data
• Model Builder – preparing SMIs for situational analysis within various models of the user’s preference