TRAINING, EDUCATION, & SYSTEMS SAVVY

Stewart Mader’s blog is a great place to find web wisdom. Today he quotes from Tony Byrne’spost “Education versus Training,” so I will too. I resonate with two of the key points in the post:

...unless your workplace is some sort of rigid digital production line, your colleagues need something else besides training. They need education.  Education means explaining to people why you're implementing the system, including the broader context and hoped-for benefits, along with future enhancements.... Information management systems rarely work as advertised, especially with initial implementations. People who understand the bigger picture will adapt and get more value from the technology in the long run.

Byrne specifically references collaboration and other social tools, but I think the points apply broadly. Education (versus training, which certainly has its own role) helps us to see a tool within the context of the organization. Good education, I argue, lets you then make choices about both the technology and the context to better understand how to weave them together into something especially powerful and effective. Good education helps you develop systems savvy in that you can see the component parts of the offerings and make design decisions regarding their use (or non-use) in your setting. I think Byrne is acknowledging this intertwining of technology/organizations/people when he says that people will adapt and thus get more value out of the overall system. Given these insights, I’ve added Byrne’s twitter stream to the Org-Systems-Thinkers list (Stewart Mader was already on it). Anyone else you think I should add to stay on top of extreme systems savvy examples?