Can Enterprises Come to Grips With ‘Web 2.0 Creep’?
by Joe McKendrick
My colleague Paula Thornton recently observed that Cisco Systems appears to be not only talking the talk on Web 2.0, but also walking the walk.
Now, NetworkWorld’s Phil Hochmuth provides further analysis of remarks by Cisco CEO John Chambers and other IT executives at the recent Interop confab to conclude that a new phenomenon is shaping enterprises as of late: “Web 2.0 creep.”
Chambers put it this way — getting Web 2.0 [and by extension, Enterprise 2.0] into the enterprise involves an end-run around IT. He observed in his keynote that Web 2.0 software such as blogs, chat, Web video and other tools, have “been a way that people kind of communicated in spite of the IT department” inside large organizations. “Now the IT department has to lead.”
It’s not that IT is unaware of these new tools and methodologies. The networking folks in attendance at Interop certainly are well aware of Web 2.0/E2.0 and the collaborative powers the technologies have to offer. The biggest challenge is attaching hard-dollar business value to the solutions.
As Tom Marcin, director of global telecommunications at DuPont, put it at one panel discussion:
“We’re now being asked to build social networks and self-forming networks to solve business problems. We’re expected to transform businesses. But guess what, we’re expected to reduce costs. Collaboration tools are of value to us. But we can’t sell a project on migrating 60,000 employees, based upon the soft benefits associated with it. I need to show demonstrable savings directly linked to the solution we put in. One month of data on a pilot would not cut it.”
Maybe I’ve been on the planet to long, but these arguments sound awfully familiar. In the 1980s, employees (including IT employees themselves) brought PCs into their departments to get around the process delays associated with Big centralized, heavily regulated IT. In the 1990s, it was the Internet, followed by mobile devices. Lately, its been Web services.
Every generation has its rebellious spirit. Web 2.0/E2.0 is only the latest evolution of rapidly deployable tools and methodologies that can get at business problems faster than the more deliberate and committee-intensive approaches demanded by IT and corporate management.
