Monthly Archives: September 2012

Glossaire de la retraite

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De plus en plus important d’en savoir:

Taux de couverture 
On parle d’un taux de couverture de 100% lorsqu’une caisse de pension dispose d’une fortune suffisante pour verser d’un seul coup le montant des cotisations de prévoyance à tous ses assurés, respectivement de s’acquitter de toutes ses obligations à la fois.
Taux de conversion
L’avoir de vieillesse peut être comparé à un gâteau. Le taux de conversion définit la taille des parts de gâteau que nous pouvons couper chaque année. Plus le taux de conversion est bas, plus le gâteau durera longtemps, et vice-versa.
Taux d’intérêt minimum 
Les caisses de pension sont obligées de rémunérer les avoirs de leurs assurés à un taux d’intérêt minimal. Ce taux, qui n’est valable que pour la part obligatoire, est défini par le Conseil fédéral.
Avoir de vieillesse
L’avoir de vieillesse est l’argent que nous versons avec l’employeur au deuxième pilier durant notre vie professionnelle et qui, majoré des intérêts, sera un jour à notre disposition. Dans le régime obligatoire, l’employeur en finance au moins la moitié. L’avoir de vieillesse peut être comparé à un compte que l’on aurait dans une caisse de pension au lieu d’une banque.
Source: LeTemps (letemps.ch)

Virtual offices

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Hopefully sooner than later virtual offices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_office) will be common work  place for many people that currently commute to work to stay all day in front of a computer and next to a phone.

My dream of a virtual office is to have the daily choice to work from home or go to this co-working spaces where you meet people with completely different background and doing something different from what you do.

For this to come true, and in my field as an IT consultant, there are some things that would need to change:

  • short effective (regular) meetings using state-of-art tools to combine video-conference, whiteboard and shared computer screens.
  • clients need to be able to add temporary accesses to their internal network from a known outside source, so the consultant can either SSH or RDP the necessary machines.

In order this to come true, both management, security and technical sides of the companies need to agree and change the way they act today. A closed environment is not anymore possible.

Yes, I also see dangers on this solutions. Companies can start using people from cheaper countries to perform the work that, until now, was done by someone local. But this is already true in my world: some companies hire consultants from France to work couple of days in Switzerland. However Swiss companies luckily prefer people living locally (not necessarily Swiss), I believe because of the state of mind you have when living in the region with a compatible salary and way of living. 

By the way, existing shared-office places in Geneva:

Knowledge Management

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In the last few months (a year?) my interest on knowledge management, both personal knowledge and team knowlegde has increased.

Since the time I started work at CERN, back in 2003, the usage of wikis become part of my daily life. Being creating, feeding, reading or just promoting. I find that knowledge should be shared no matter what.

Being now consultant the knowledge sharing is a topic that not everyone agrees on. Some advocate and practice that your knowlegde belongs to you and when providing some solution to a client you give them the least knowledge possible, so that they are dependent on you. On the opposite side, I promote the share of the knowledge and try to pass as much information as possible to clients so that they are not dependent on me or even on my company. My experience shows that the fact they admire this share of knowledge, they prefer to continue to call me or the company I work for to do the job, even though they have all the information that allows to do themselves (but not the experience).

But my goal has been to know what is the best way to manage knowlegde, both personal (a future blog entry) and collective. To learn more on this, currently I follow on this topic two sources:
Harvard Business Review – www.hbr.org
Harold Jarche – Life in Perpetual Beta – www.jarche.com