Whatever one can say about intellectualism as the devotion to the exercise of intellect, it seems that nowadays we face a growing wave of anti-intellectualism.
Recently we launched two projects with Francesco, Co-editor of Ariadne, both related with e-participation and e-democracy. Besides our commitment in meeting the goals of the projects, we were both personally interested in the study of the patterns of uptake and adoption by the citizens and the communities themselves. It is early to express a final opinion, but my feeling is that in the same way that we talk about orchestration and choreography of software or business processes, there is need to research issues of choreography and orchestration in the social and inter-personal processes of the people involved in tasks and activities at all levels.
I read in a best-selling “business” book that while in the past the core question to answer was “what business we are in”, now the need is for finding the appropriate business model.
Is it because of my naivety that I disagree with this? I rather think that this shift in focus from the business to the business model is not helping anyone – besides the modeling experts and the related professions. But again, how can you model someone’s business while this person is ignorant of the business s/he is in?
I am depressed when I see young and smart people dedicating years of their life in serving a system without any personal motivation to change it a little bit.
How can it be that snails leave behind them a silver trace, while people fail to do so? (I suppose, it is because they may not have an appropriate business model for this…)
I am tempted to close the editorial of this seventh issue of Ariadne with a remark on the adequacy of our tools when we approach cases or projects. Why are there project managers running multi-million Euros projects that are experts in reading MS Project diagrams but unable to elaborate on the nature of errors or the complexities and suboptimalities of the human-to-human interactions? And, finally, why do people trust such ill-educated project managers?
Adamantios Koumpis
You may contact Adamantios at: akou@altec.gr
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