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Ethnographic Researches by Japanese Firms Draw Attention
Phil Keys, Tech-On (Nikkei Business Publications), October 15, 2007
Excerpts from the article:
Not only companies from the U.S. and Europe, but also Japanese companies, drew the attention of participants to their research at "Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC2007)," an event concerning ethnographic research at companies.
Palo Alto Research Center Inc. (PARC) of the United States, for example, introduced a research that it started in 2004 targeting the development process at Fujitsu's software business department in its program titled "Teaching Organizational Ethnography." One of this research's objectives was to enhance knowledge in ethnography at Fujitsu.
After having system engineers (SE) that develop software take ethnographic lectures for about a week, PARC asked the SEs to observe offices in which software products that they had developed were actually being used.
Fujitsu's aim was to make its SEs understand clients better. However, "Most of all, SEs didn't sympathize with clients as we had expected. Our first tough hurdle was to have SEs accept that ethnography is worthwhile for their job," said Nozomi Ikeya, research scientist, Computing Science Laboratory, PARC.
Fujitsu, however, still continues in-house ethnographic lectures by its employees, and therefore the research may be described as helped the ethnographic method stay in the IT industry.
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