In the first part we looked at the building blocks of the Digital System — the digital apps and services and their basic functions that need to be known in 2023. Now it's time to give these building blocks a structure in part two. This is how the Digital System is created in the first place — it emerges from this structure and enables you to iteratively generate new knowledge.
A system consists of its elements and the relationships between these elements. The building blocks must therefore be related to one another — they must be given a structure. We then look at the processes in the third part. These processes are the methods and approaches, e.g. Getting Things Done (Book on Amazon) by David Allen and Building a Second Brain (blog post) by Tiago Forte. The three parts — the building blocks, the structure, and the processes — make up the full Digital System that empowers you for knowledge work.
In this article I give an introduction to the structure of the Digital System.
First a short excursion why I am convinced that everyone has to master knowledge work — that means knowing how to deal with the building blocks of the Digital System. In a few decades (or maybe just years, see ChatGPT) our activities will shift completely into the sphere of knowledge work, starting with our professional activities and then also private activities. All hobby activities are excluded here — activities that are done purely for joy. These remain as they are; they do well and continue to exist. After all, without leisure time, hobbies and fun, life makes no sense at all.
The ingenuity of digitalization is infinite and viewed as a whole, we are still at the beginning of the digital history. Digitalization and digital tools offer opportunities for technical automation and empowerment of activities that people perform. Humans always have sought and invented new ways to make performing necessary or desirable activities more productive. In other words, even the first humans had their first tools at hand with their sharp stones. Thousands of years later in the future, today, we actually still have our tools in our hands — our smartphones, tablets, laptops & Co. In between there is a beautiful story of human inventions and innovations — from discovering fire, the mill, the steam engine, the first computers and up to today's ubiquitous digitalization.
Each of these tools has optimized activities that humans had to perform manually and by hand. This happened because tools are placed between the people and the actual doing of the activity. The activity can thus be carried out faster, with fewer resources or with better quality — or even with a combination of the three improvements. The activity becomes more productive. Even new activities and thus completely new capabilities become possible that could not have been thought of before. I don't know about you, but I think this perspective puts the apps and digital services in a completely different light. They empower us to do things faster, easier, and better, and allow us to focus on what really matters — being productive.
Don't forget this view and never let yourself be taken over by digitalization itself. It is and remains a means to an end, and that end is in your hands.
With its structure, the Digital System gives you a starting point for your knowledge work.
Without a structure, we would quickly face another hurdle of enormous complexity: we now understand the building blocks of the Digital System, but how are they supposed to work together or even interlock? And how do they enable us to work productively with our system?
In the first part [LINK] we categorized the building blocks of the Digital System into passive and active building blocks. For the structure of our Digital System, we focus on the active building blocks, as these are the building blocks with which we actively work. In our context, “actively work” means everything that happens in the context of knowledge work. We can't use the building blocks directly either. We need an abstraction level to be able to define the structure — a so-called meta-model.
<aside> <img src="/icons/network_gray.svg" alt="/icons/network_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Active Building Blocks
Without a meta-model, a structure would look something like this:
A structure based on the active building blocks
While this "structure" isn't wrong, it doesn't really help us either — since these relations don't say anything about which elements are connected to each other. This structure only considers the building-block-level. We need a structure at the level of the actual knowledge work.
The aim of the meta-model is therefore to define the necessary entities and their relationships to one another, which in turn exist within the building blocks. Who is familiar with the modeling language UML: We need a class diagram for our Digital System.
In the following diagram you get a complete overview of the meta-model, which I also use for my Digital System.
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The meta-model for the Structure of the Digital System (2023)