Welcome on Jeremy Depauw's web page.  It aims to host the current stage of my PhD Thesis building.  Step-by-step, I will update it in order to share the evolution of my work. 

It is important to keep in mind that it is not a research diary.  You'll find it on my weblog and podcast entiteld live'IT.

Site under Construction 

General Information

The orginel title of my PhD thesis, deposed last year : 

L'intelligence économique et stratégique comme processus de médiation de l'information dans les organisations. Analyse du cheminement de l'information et de l'utilisation des sources, dans une perspective comparative entre grandes entreprises et médias d'information.

This could be translated (without porfessionalism) :

Economic and strategic intelligence as process of mediation of information in the organizations.  Advance of information and use of the sources analysis, from a comparative point of view between large companies and Mass Information media.

Fields of Research 

This is built around  3 fields of research:

  • Information Management (not technical) e.g: Competitive Intelligence, Strategic watch, Business intelligence, Knowlege Management, etc.
  • Communication studies, and especially Journalism study and Media Sociology
  • Documentation Science, as theoretical framework for the concept of mediation

Subject Definition

After a few mounths of work, I went further in the definition of that subject.  It could be summarized like that:

  • Information management services in organization and journalists in media may be compared thanks to their common aspect : the concept of mediation (collect, treatment and distribution of information)
  • The concept of mediation can be used on two levels of focus:
    -1st Level : Concrete mediation of information (collect, treatment and distribution)
    -2nd level : Intermediary role of Mediator in several network he manages and coordinates 
  • A matrix of analysis, used as framework for the theoretical part of the thesis has been built.  It offers a three step analysis, based on 3 levels of focus :micro (individual: journalist/watcher), meso (individual within their organisation) et macro (organisation/media as system in their environement)

But this was not enough to achieve a thesis with original added value and effective effect on the research field.  That is why we (me and my supervisor) decided to introduce the subject into the context of the evolution of WEB 2.0.  
The idea is to observe mediator's changing place since Web 2.0 tools have appeared.  We know that mediators (journalists or watchers) played a role of forced relay in information flows.

The hypothese may be represented as:
         Forced Relay ------Web 2.0 Tools--------> ?? 

The last step in the subject building is now to identify the destination of that evolution.  In order to achieve that task, we decided to move to organizational ground.

French speaking readers may download the summary of that description.