Some Expertise, Please
I Cringley informs us that IBM has patented a “platform for capturing knowledge”. Quoting Cringley
(it uses) an imersive (sic) gaming environment to transfer expert knowledge held by employees “aged 50 and older” to 18-25 year-old trainees who find manuals “difficult to read and understand.”
Of course, manuals can be difficult to read and understand. Usually because they are poorly written. But I never thought that the job of manuals was to transfer “expertise”. To the contrary, manuals usually set forth standards for completing tasks. Expertise is needed to identify the tasks to be undertaken and to formulate standards for completing them in order to achieve predictable results. In other words, expertise creates systems that use manuals, not the other way around.
I think Cringley is right to be skeptical. Expertise can be transferred, but this is through a slow and individual process called mentoring. Sad to say, mentoring has not been in fashion for some time (though it appears to be making a comeback in the tech start up world). To the contrary, the 20th century infatuation with leveraging efficiency makes mentoring appear old fashioned. But hasn’t it already been demonstrated that transferring the lust for “efficiency for efficiency’s sake” is our way of undressing the egotistical emperor?
Thus, we have a rather odd sense of what “epertise” is all about. For example we accept that Wall Street lawyers have high levels of “expertise” in financial matters. But did any of them detect or deter the silliness that their Wall Street clients were engaged in that created the financial meltdown? Of course not. They have “expertise”. But not for that. And the SEC? Conveniently for some, its “expertise” in oversight was debased. And would an “immersive gaming platform” change this? Well …. one might argue that this is precisely what we already have.