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guest editor
Hopefully wiser, but older?
Guest editor rik maes reflects on his silver jubilee as professor at the
University of Amsterdam
nce upon a time, I used to be the youngest
O professor in the Netherlands. To be honest, there
are moments when I still feel so, despite the fact
that the University of Amsterdam recently offered me a
once-only double monthly salary, the most tangible proof of
my honourable length of service. Time to reflect on my
“being in the world”!
I truthfully find “professor” the most beautiful
profession on earth: being in a position where at the
same time I can encounter terrifically inspiring people
and I am supposed to inspire people myself, where I am
reasonably uninhibited to give my thoughts free rein and
where I can consider socially relevant issues as my
natural area for special attention. I consider all these
among the most challenging presents a person can get
on earth.
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convergence
I am a professor in information management but people
visiting my website – dedicated to information
management, learning and sense-making and at the same
time making frequent use of poetry, arts and other at first
glance exotic sources of inspiration – quite often ask me:
“Is all this about information management?” The answer is,
as so often in life, “yes and no”.
Yes. For a long period, we identified information
management as the management of information technology.
The effect is that even nowadays many so-called experts
reduce “information” to what can be stored in a
computerised database. In this vision, a person is, in a
nutshell, nothing but the combination of name and address
and of, if so desired, some other classifiable attributes. This
reductionistic view has to a large extent conquered the
organisational world and even reached the highest
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management levels. Detached management based on
abstract figures is its most immediate consequence; a
colleague of mine, Luc Hoebeke, calls such managers
“fervent lovers of abstract art”. I passionately argue in
favour of a much richer vision on information: information
as inspiration. Self-evidently, the poetic power of words and
arts is an integral part of any real information concept and
“being informed”, involving feelings, interpretations,
involvement, etc, is more than “having the right information”
extracted from a database.
Information is what human beings share, and this is –
also in an organisational context – substantially more than
what pseudo-traditionalists and technology freaks alike
understand by the above-all manageable concept of
“information”.
No. We divided our world in such an artificial way that
even the fundamental activities of thinking, feeling and
doing are spread over different courses of study and
institutions, respectively the universities, the art
academies and the institutes for professional education.
This endless division of realities in partial aspects is in fact
part of the problem, if not the problem itself: fragmentarily
speaking, everybody is perfectly right. Information
technology is to a large extent contributing to this frag-
mentation: narrowcasting is the next step in this seemingly
endless evolution. Accordingly, the illusion that one single
discipline, even if this discipline is information
management, could explain or even design the whole
world is illusory. Long live diversity and parity of different
lines of approach; I try to accommodate them on my
website. The fact that my website is therefore a
combination of my own work and that of others is, in my
opinion, a fortunate consequence of this vision.
My understanding slant causes some people to call me
a relativist, but is this appropriate? Not in the sense that I
find everything of equal value: I believe in our
responsibility, quoting Herbert Simon, “to leave more
possibilities open to future generations than we ourselves
inherited”. I would rather call myself a “relationist”, in the
sense that, maybe wiser through all my years on Mother
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convergence
guest editor
Earth, I strongly believe in establishing relations between
opinions, aspects and points of view in order to attain a
balanced and finely tuned judgement. I doubt whether I am
always successful in this respect...
Some people even call me a deconstructivist, primarily
referring to my critical analysis of terms frequently used in
information management, like “architect” or “management”
or of technological phenomena such as ERP or PowerPoint.
What is most striking is that these reproaches are mainly
made by people who use these terms or phenomena totally
deprived of their original meaning; what they call
“information architect”, for example, is a downright
caricature of the traditional concept of “architect”. Who is the
deconstructivist and who is the reconstructivist in this case?
Am I a social constructivist? For one thing, I can’t help
saying that too many people find everything but the kitchen
sink socially constructed. I personally interpret “social”
primarily in the sense of “rooted in practice”. I consider the
multi-coloured practice of people’s encounters as the
foundations of organisational and societal acts. In these
encounters, sense-making – a central concept in
information management – emerges. One could, I believe,
better call me a “practical constructivist”.
My initial schooling was as an engineer. People aware
of my vision on information management sometimes ask
me whether I have strayed too far from engineering. With
this, they are invariably suggesting the world of figures,
formulas and computable realities. I personally believe that
I am coming closer to the original meaning of “engineer”:
not studying the existing world, yet designing the future
one for which we share a common responsibility and where
the immaterial world of information, knowledge and
wisdom occupy centre stage. Information management is,
all things considered, a design discipline.
Children of a school next door recently asked my
opinion on the neighbourhood’s suitability for children.
Noting my surprise, they added that the schoolteacher
requested them also to interview “very old people”. I was
quite sure they meant “hopefully wise people”. With
hindsight, I still hope so...
vol 8 no 1