Love thine enemies
by Euan Semple
OK maybe enemies is a bit strong but, having spent the past year working with a wide range of clients, if there is a single, common block to introducing social computing into organisations it is IT departments.
Part of this is a cultural thing. Corporate IT guys been brought up to manage risk rather than creativity and the free wheeling, individualist nature of Enterprise 2.0 scares the wits out of a lot of them. Even the word social makes them jumpy.
Part of it is a technological thing. PHP and Perl might as well be foreign languages to your average IT bod and many of the innovative platforms for Enterprise 2.0 are seen as sub-professional and inherently risky.
Part of it is remoteness. A lot of IT departments have grown apart from their businesses either through the growth of their own empires or as a reaction to being the fall guys when things go wrong. Either way they are not seen as enablers and part of the business of business.
But things are about to get very different. As Adrian Sannier of Arizona State University says in a recent article in The Economist:
In the past, innovation was driven by the military or corporate markets. But now the consumer market, with its vast economies of scale and appetite for novelty, leads the way. Compared with the staid corporate-software industry, using these services is like “receiving technology from an advanced civilisation”
If Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen then the way we relate to our IT is going to have to change and as in any relationship the only thing we have the power to change is ourselves. We have to make it easy for our IT guys to help us. We need to approach them with a desire to work together rather than a desire for retribution and we need to find ways of conveying the business benefits along with the fun!
