by Jevon MacDonald
May 2, 2007 at 8:19 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software
As the Enterprise 2.0 conversation starts to gain ground, a lot of people are starting to talk about Enterprise 2.0 “implementations”, or “social computing strategies” and other big ideas.
Before you do that though, stop and think seriously about how long all that is going to take you to do. If doing something 6 months from now good enough?
My challenge to you is that No, it is not good enough. Why? Because it is already happening.
Facebook started off as the place your college interns were going to find dates, but as you probably noticed: if you aren’t on there yet, you will be soon. Facebook isn’t just about getting dates any more, your employees are building their profiles on it, right there in public. They have to go to facebook, because you aren’t providing an alternative.
Conceptshare, Google Docs, Wufoo, SmartSheet and others are replacing all of your expensive Microsoft Office and other licenses. What you once paid millions for is now being put online, used for free, and is resting outside your firewall.
Gmail is, I am afraid, more than just email. Gmail has GTalk, which is a real-time presence and instant messaging tool. So, everyone who doesn’t have a Blackberry is probably hooked in to GTalk, and because it travels over normal web protocols, you might not even know it’s there. But that’s a good thing in many ways, because it reminds you that the weeks you spent devising an instant messaging policy with the IT department was pretty much useless.
Blackberry Pin-to-Pin
Any employee that has a Blackberry probably has 10 or 20 people on their Blackberry Messenger and they are talking to them constantly. While you are stuck in email, they are passing tiny little messages back and forth that all seem small and irrelevant on their own, but add up to a constant ever-changing conversation that you are missing.
And then, when you think you have it all figured out, Twitter is a weird cross between them all. It’s not Facebook, but it is persona, and it’s not messaging, but it is communication. It’s not direct like a Blackberry message, but instead a Twitter is a broadcast of something you are thinking about.
Am I saying that Twitter is something you need to bring in to your enterprise? No, well.. Not really.
But you would be remiss to ignore the direction that these tools are pointing you in. The most savvy workers are adapting these outside tools to their current work world, and they are getting used to them.
The biggest shift, the one that Facebook has shown most predominantly, is that these things are no longer just geeky pursuits that the guys in your IT department get over-excited about, they are the now part of the social fabric of a huge majority of 20-somethings, and the demographic is growing at an incredible rate.
This all happened in, more or less, the last year, and the rate of change is increasing rapidly.
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Like I said – they don’t even have to do anything. Shame they have lost the ability to influence what is happening in the process …..
You write that, for example, Google Docs will replace expensive desktop apps such as the ones in Microsoft Office. I very strongly disagree on this. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a nice initiative, but are is extremely far from becoming a real threat to MS Office apps and similar apps. First of all, you need to be sure of 100% availability / reliability for productivity tools. I don’t believe this will happen in a VERY long time. Secondly, the interactivity and functionality of a desktop app is superior to web 2.0 apps. The only good thing about Google Docs & Spreadsheets is that it is free. If I had to pay for it, I would not even think about using it. I have used if since over 6 months and am impressed that it is free and you can collaborate on documents, but the editor is really bad.
Oscar: I agree with everything you say re: the issues around those applications, but what I was trying to say in this post was that in fact, as much as we tell ourselves that we have a better way of doing something, or that there isn’t enough functionality in one product or the others, it is still up to the users to really decide what gets used. Before, they had no choice but use MS Office, because that is what IT installed for them, now — they can make the choice on their own.
What I have seen for myself is that the slide is starting to happen, and users are starting to go to places like Google Docs, whether IT or anyone else likes it or not. That’s just reality.
Jevon, I agree with you that things are really starting to happen. The most important thing is not advances in technology, but that people is starting to believe in web apps as a serious alternative and ultimately a replacement for desktop apps. But for most organizations, today, it will still be a good strategy to wait things out a bit. I don’t really see what they will miss by doing so, as long as they follow how things are developing. As always, users (early adopters) will adopt things earlier than organizations. But I am sure that most of the users who start using, for example, Google Docs & Spreadsheets do not abandon their equivalent desktop apps. Or even plan to do so. Yet. They see a use for web apps for certain tasks and information and use if for those specific purposes.
Some large organisations block webmail and (public) instant messenger sites, not because they do not want email or IM to be used, but because they are highly regulated firms and must keep control over communications for regulatory reasons. No doubt they will do the same for social networking sites, blogs or whatever the next threat seems to be. They would, of course, be wise to make all this possible within the firewall.
The positioning of anything 2.0 as “replacement” of old, bad practices is in itself self-defeating: those old practices are there because of things that are very crucial to corporations, such as liability, intellectual property, and compliance (which in themselves are intertwined with the realities of capitalism). Assuming that E2.0 can eliminate those constraints just creates false expectations, and ultimately will throw E2.0 into the “through of disillusion” faster.
Generational issues are not new (they are there since I was young 
and the ‘consumerization of IT’ is old enough to be extensively covered by Forrester. Thus, liberally distributing 2.0 tags for everything we want to highlight doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Sure, there are consumer level technologies that are exposing new ways of interaction and collaboration. and also surely, those new memes and channels are making it into the enterprise. But Office won’t go away (you may say that’
s because it’s too heavy to move), at least for quite a few years. Neither will SharePoint, or Exchange (perhaps for the same reasons).
They won’t go away at least not until the ‘2.0′ thingy proves that it can manage liabilities, compliance, IP, security threats, and all of those pesky things produced by… reality. Not truly 2.anything, but rather a long series of minor releases.
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