Myopic Reimagining

I just finished reading Mary Branscombe's review of Business Reimagined: Why work isn't working and what you can do about it, by Dave Coplin, which showed up on ZDNet early this morning. I have nothing to complain about as far as the "message" of the book is concerned. The only thing that bothers me is that nothing in the book, at least as accounted for by Branscombe, is new. We were going down the same road fifteen years ago, when we were calling it "knowledge sharing," particularly the part about paying as much attention to the social infrastructure of the workplace as to the supporting technology. These days the very mention of knowledge sharing is like to do nothing more than raise eyebrows. Any strong reaction will probably entail some impolite reference to Kool-Aid.

According to her biographical statement for ZDNet, Branscombe "has been a technology writer for nearly two decades." This would imply that she was around when they started serving that Kool-Aid. Was she not around as the movement grew and then fizzled? One can ask the same about Coplin, but these days we are not surprised when authors churn out new books before doing any background homework. The bottom line is that Branscombe and Coplin both represent the current condition of willful myopia whenever "historical knowledge" is involved, which just means that they are both model representative of the community of technology specialists!