‘Social Knowledge Network’ vendor Inmagic recently spoke to me for their interview series. Unfortunately there were problems with the audio recording, so they’ve provided a transcript of the interview on issues including uptake of Enterprise 2.0, the Enterprise 2.0 vendor landscape, the future of work, and what I enjoy about my own work.
The full interview is worth a read, but here is a quick excerpt. I recently wrote what turned out to be a very popular post on What Enterprise 2.0 means for the CIO and IT department offering six key issues. Inmagic took a couple of these points and discussed them on their blog. Here is the follow-up on that during the interview.
Janelle: I want to talk about your latest book, which is “Implementing Enterprise 2.0.” It’s something that we covered on our blog at Inmagic and there was an excerpt that you had on your blog where you talked about six implications of Enterprise 2.0 for IT. And a couple that drew our attention were your points about how it enables end users and how the requirements for IT security and archiving have gone up. Do you see either of these as an impediment to E2.0 adoption or do you think they are necessary ways to help organizations operate?
Ross: Let’s take those individually. First, end users are enabled. This is a really broad trend. It’s power for the individual, power for consumers. In this case, power to the end user inside organizations. And the question is how to treat it. The implication for the technology department and CIOs is they can treat this as a threat-and some of them do, they say this is a loss of my control. But I think more are treating this as something fantastic. We are now able to give our users the ability to do things for themselves, rather than have a backlog of requests for us to do. And it lets us be more creative, which is more of an enabler. But I think in some organizations there is still a fear that this is going to undermine the power that the empire has. Security issues are not going to go away. So as you start to see more touch points, more activities, we do need to establish archiving, and still be able to make sure that the right touch points are covered within the boundaries of the organization.
Inmagic are offering a free copy of my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0 (valued at US$195) to whoever writes the best comment on the interview. So head over to the interview and write an interesting comment!
Visualization of our activities and model
Our priorities for 2012
