This stuff from ReadWriteWeb is great. It shines a light, regardless how ephemeral, on “processes,” “running a business” and how “technology can help.” Even in the Enterprise.
These are Good Things for ReadWriteWeb, Good Things for collective Readers, and Good Things for Mean Business.
But I.T. 1.0 isn’t yet fully-baked. I.T. .9 (beta!) is hardly there in a ubiquitous way.
WHERE’S MY PAPERLESS OFFICE?
is a simple, hackneyed example.
We certainly don’t begrudge The New, New Thing, but there’s about 30 years worth of New Things that can yet be leveraged to more serious business advantage.
This isn’t advantage in the sense of “I have it and my competitors don’t,” this is “I’m being smart with my business, taking advantage of things – technologies – available to me, and making them work for my business.” (in this sense, many of your competitors don’t have it …)
Are the “new technologies” for business – wikis, cloud services and doc versioning platforms – so much different from the knowledge bases, time sharing and document fileshares that have been available – and underutilized – for years?
We love the “self-provisioning” userbase in Enterprise 2.0. It’s better even than User Generated Content: This is people NOT calling support lines and instead Doing Their Thing without our help thanks to the wonderful knowledgebases we’ve put together. This works, to be sure, but it wasn’t fully sorted out – or put in effect – in Enterprise 1.0.
Better searches, instant feedback, and peer recommendations / edits / contributions will help, but it’s mindset that will make the difference: Adoption out of need, want and executive mandate is what’s required for now to get this stuff inside – and working – in the Enterprise. (That’s grassroots up and management down.)
