Décadence ou renaissance - Le point de vue de Martin Roulleaux Dugage
Finalement, les Echos ont publié mon article. Pour l'instant trois commentaires positifs.
Peut-être que d'autres vont me ruer dans les brancarts. Ca me fait penser à tschangqui vient de se faire virer de chez Bloomberg à Honk-Kong à cause de son weblog, jugé incompatible avec son job.
It is surprising, and somewhat comforting, to realize that John Seely Brown’s
presentation "Learning, Working and Playing in the Digital Age" made back in 1999 is still to be meditated.
(It reminds me of Dali's answer to a question by a journalist:
Q- "What's new, Salvador Dali?" A- "Velasquez!!!")
I have extracted a few quotes that I find particularly interesting. Still a lot to meditate here.
I bumped into the web site Abbaye du Mont des Cats - L'Abbaye Sainte Marie du Mont des Cats, a monastery in Northern France. I found it truly interesting from a community/KM perspective. It is lively (music and video), timely (you know what is currently going on in the monastery, you can download the latest homelies of the abbey etc.), relevant (useful information about life at the monastery, about how to get there etc...), collaborative (prayer intents...)
I should have thought about it earlier. Religious communities are bound to make a very effective use of web-based tools, because they are webs themselves. On the other hand, dictatorships (including corporate dictatorships) cannot. They still misunderstand the web (and intranets) and view it as a medium for propaganda. Of course, they fail, and they blame the tool.
Bumping into Open Tech Support - The Ultimate Tech Support Site, I came to think...
When I have a computer problem here in the office, I sometimes ring IT support for help. An anonymous guy I do not know (each time someone different) answers the phone, asks me a series of questions, and then gives me a ticket number. Any time between a few hours and three months after (depending on the priority), another guy comes to my office, takes my seat, asks for my ID and password and tries to troubleshoot the problem. I don’t know what he is doing; he mumbles to himself, and does not try to explain anything. Then one of two things can happen. Either he leaves without a solution, which leads to another ticket or to the new claim that « we don’t support this software », or his solution works but with dramatic side effects on other applications. (Sounds familiar ?)
Why couldn't tech support take a different perspective and view its primary role as educating employees to solve the problems themselves? Wouldn't it look very different? The employee would be expected to learn the basics with manuals ou e-learning tools, even on company time. She would then « graduate » into a community of practice of IT users of the company, with special interest groups, discussion forums, troubleshooting guides, meetings etc. She would not pay for the service of having her PC troubleshooted, but for the service of accessing the community and its social network.
It would undoubtedly take more of her time, but she would be incredibly more effective and happy in her daily work.
I know I would.
