Organisational memories

Procurement can start good relationships but engagement needs to be continually worked at. In one of my case studies, the initial procurement was set up years earlier, but by 2007 people were not working together. The replacement senior management had to overcome adversarial tensions in order to create new relationships. Those tensions had been so strong that participants still remembered them over a year later. Bad memories take time to overcome {*}, and engagement takes time and has to be worked at continually.

*Citing whom? Do organisations have memories and do they matter? In central government, civil service senior managers move frequently so don't they lose organisational memory? Probably. Few remember the IT debacles of the 1980s, like Camelot. See Tony Collin's Computer Weekly Blog.

Published

I asked the OU in-house legal experts for advice on copyright. Apparently the OU cuttings service (I didn't know we had one) had already discovered it - before I knew it was out - and sent me a pdf here. It has a link that takes me to my Computer Weekly opinion here.

Copyright

Computer Weekly sent me an email asking me to sign

"Can we have the attached right to republish agreement signed and sent back to us. This is not a copyright, only a right to republish."

But the attachment says that "during the term of the agreement" (with no term given) I'll agree to publish 'it' exclusively in CW, so that isn't the same as the covering email. Now, the OU has provided some seminars during our research training on things like copyright and being careful what you sign away to journals, but journals aren't quite the same. So I went to my frequently-published-relative for advice. FPR responded promptly, querying the term:

"They seem to be retaining the right of veto over any publication. That's okay if it's for, say, 90 days - but not forever. That's the question I'd ask. 90 days is common."

So I might respond that I'm happy to sell them exclusive rights in all forms of publication from 90 days after date of first publication, and the right in perpetuity to use the piece for Computer Weekly. How's that sound?

Article in Computer Weekly

More people read Computer Weekly than will ever read my dissertation, when it's written, so I'm well chuffed that Computer Weekly has accepted a short opinion article from me. My ideas will get more exposure there than in academia.

It should appear in next week's on-line site and perhaps in the magazine as well.