by Paula Thornton
June 22, 2007 at 1:30 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0, barriers
Such is my spin on Sue Feldman’s (IDC) recent impressions given to InformationWeek:
“IT managers and executives largely didn’t know any of this was going on”.
This was in response to IDC research numbers showing that:
“45% of companies have workers blogging,
43% use RSS feeds, and
35% of companies have employees using wikis”.
These numbers were part of Marthin De Beer’s (Cisco) keynote at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Another favorite line of mine:
“IT managers better start preparing to deal with Web 2.0 technologies,
…because sooner or later — and it’ll probably be sooner
– they’re going to have to deal with it.”
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I saw this and thought the same thing. I’m worried what the IT managers might try to do to regain control. I doubt many will be embracing these tools — I suspect they will attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. I wrote about this yesterday: Wrapping-up the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Kevin. Thanks for sharing your own thoughts. As I read through them I was struck at the end by something that I believe to be a ‘gap’ (part of the disconnect). You said that the only way IT could eliminate these tools is to shut down the internet (ok, that’s my own restatement). But this misses the point of the potential. The potential is in 2.0 design being applied to EVERYTHING that IT touches.
Put another way…1) RETHINK every single corporate application currently in production…are there high volume activities that can be segmented out into a mini-function that is exposed via a single entry (ala. akin to Amazon’s 1-click)? 2) use the various 2.0 technologies to unleash the emergent behaviors of employees to bypass KM altogether — create a virtual connected hive of thinking 3) by replacing all sorts of ‘formal’ structure with emergent structure IT can reallocate a LOT of resources currently aligned to managing the structure.
When Enterprise 2.0 is given its legs (think: horse racing) the results will dwarf even the ‘outlandish’ potential that was built into stock prices during the internet boom. Management and security operating structures require tremendous overhead (watch as ‘blackbelt’ suddenly has no meaning). Replacing those structures with a more natural order is liberating to all sorts of resources…the impact to the bottom line will be tremendous (provided people are willing to ‘let go’ of these superflous security blankets…well, they won’t have to…competition will show up and either force the issue or put them out of business).
I agree with you completely. Good comment.
Being an IT administrative type myself my comments mostly were lamenting the fact that my IT colleagues were letting this golden opportunity slip away. Rather than embracing these technologies I see too many trying to assert their control over them. They won’t succeed, and the only result will be to marginalize their significance in the enterprise.
Too often I’ve witnessed an over-exhertion of control among those who are engaged in their jobs as imposters (or insisting on going through the motions of CMMI and/or other methods required by government and other accounts — methods that add cost but are proven to not increase quality). They leverage the control to give the impression that they are competent.
This is particularly the case as it relates to development. The face of development as we know it today has to change. Emergent development delivers faster, more accurate results — dropping the cost out of the model…including the cost of management/controls. Does that mean there shouldn’t be any management or controls? Hardly. It does mean that it needs to be significantly different than what is likely in place today.
There was a line from Susan Gaudin that was really troubling in that piece, “And that means adopting technologies, managing them, and securing the network from the people who use them.” I am hoping the “securing the network from” was a typo and should have been “securing the network for”.
This is where I find the most issues when working with companies and large organizations with social software is they control the functionality and value right out of the solutions. I spend a lot of time working with clients on the control issues and help them understand the value in all information shared. Most understand the value gained from sharing, as it was the promise of KM tools years ago, which never materialized the value. With many of the current social software tools there can be too much information shared, but that can be a good problem to have when one learns how to use and find the information with context.
The big nut to crack is guiding technology management through writing with policies for use of the tools rather than locking the social tools down. This is as hard as walking them through the cold start problems.
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