Once upon a time, they invented weblogs. Weblogs caused a big stir, and spread around the world in a very short time. In parallel, Web 2.0 was becoming a catchphrase, as people recognised that the time was ripe for participation, collaboration, and bottom-up rather than top-down.
After a while, the buzz cooled down, although millions of people continued blogging, and websites continued to get the Web 2.0 treatment. Everybody had a blog, and the focus was moving to what they said rather than how they said it. Web 2.0 had come of age everywhere.
Everywhere, that is, except some of the world’s biggest corporations. In our experience, a lot of people in these large companies know about collaborative software, Web 2.0, and blogs. They see the value (often having watched how their own kids use the stuff), and are keen to implement them. Convinced by the idea of Web 2.0, they start asking around about how to put it into practice, and at that point come up against any number of people who’ll tell them why it can’t be done.
And they’re often right, considering that enterprises plan their IT for three or five years into the future. As Andrew McAfee, an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, points out in his blog, the key hurdle is usually technology. “…security and access control remain key concerns among technologists, and they’ll have to be addressed before most IT departments give their blessings to Enterprise 2.0.”
What’s more, Andrew says, these tools are unlikely to spread like wildfire around the enterprise anytime in the near future.
“As I wrote at the end of last year, my most likely scenario for the near-term future of Enterprise 2.0 is somewhere between niche deployment and spotty mainstream adoption… I believe that managers and companies that are in fact willing to do this work will gain valuable capabilities and quite possibly get a leg up on the competition. But can you see why I think there might not be a lot of them, at least in the short term?”
See also “Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business” (Information Week) Thanks to Globally Local, Locally Global for the pointer.
David Harbottle
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