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About Josh Chalifour
I collaborate with Concordia University’s academic and administrative units to ensure that the university’s digital presence reflects its identity and strategic priorities. I develop, enhance, manage, and help others develop content for the university's sites, which include its public and private Web sites, mobile and social media, and newsletters.
Previously, I led and directed the content development and publishing strategies for advisory firm, Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC). As such, I was responsible for directing the bulk of the research analyst work, which centred around in-depth evaluation of enterprise software systems for end user clients. I developed many of the company's research and decision support models, reports, and services. I oversaw custom research projects (for both end users and software vendors), took the lead on its information management (ECM/WCM/collaboration) research and practices, as well as established its writing, editing, translation, and data management teams.
Subjects that particularly interest me include emerging Internet currents, information management, the implications of technology on our lives, intellectual liberty, free/libre open source software, and the ways in which people access, organize, and use information. I write about those things on various sites, such as one of my blogs www.pundit.ca
I tend to be a generalist but I also delve deeply into specialized areas when needed.
I invented Adomoc, an abstract strategy board game, which you can find out about here www.adomoc.com. Connect with me on Google+ here https://plus.google.com/116936850321760016917/about.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jchalifour |
Still Bad Customer Service (as JC)
If a company is going to use its brand, its technology, marketing, partner networks, etc. to its advantage in selling products/services, then it needs to treat customers with the same united face that it presented when selling them the product in the first place.
If I buy a Samsung product, I'm buying Samsung not Sony. I should be able to expect that Samsung will honor my purchase uniformly, wherever I am. I wouldn't expect Sony to honor it because Sony is obviously a different company--but Sumsung is Samsung.
This is an example of poor customer service.
Just One Problem with E-mails as Evidence
Companies involved in lawsuits now, must during the early discovery period, collect massive quantities of documentation from years of saved up e-mails, which the lawyers then use in their cases. This is a huge huge problem because of the nature of e-mail.
Without even getting into the reliability of who actually wrote what, these messages are way too easy to be taken out of context and thus have their meanings represented to non-participants (anyone outside the original conversation) in a way that's simply wrong. The example in this article illustrates this.
Writing an e-mail often tends to seemlessly refer to conversations, activities, and other background context that is outside of anything stated within the e-mail. It just gets worse when there are back-and-forth e-mail threads, where sometimes a whole thread is captured, other times only portions of it are sent to various participants, and they can even respond without knowing the full context, thus sending the e-mail discussion down a different path.
So e-mail archives are like semi-permanent records of things that occured but they're simultaneously very unreliable as records because they do not capture any of the "real world" context in which they occurred. And that context is frequently day-to-day trivia in people's memories so it's lost of faulty when lawyers try to resurrect it after a few years.
This is a reason why some companies implement mandatory e-mail destruction policies after a period of time. It's not that there's anything a company necessarily wishes to hide, but rather completely innocent conversations can be perverted into unintended meanings. Too bad that justice systems are able to be gamed like the example in this article shows.
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