Is the Enterprise Afraid of Web 2.0?

CIO — Few technological shifts in recent memory have challenged corporate America the way Web 2.0 is doing right now. First you have to decide what the phrase even means, as there's more than a little debate. Then comes the big question: What if any role does Web 2.0 have in the enterprise?

That question can lead to uncomfortable conversations about collaboration, information-sharing and openness. But discomfort or not, now is the time to talk about how your company might harness this growing online force.

Web 2.0 can be especially challenging for CIOs and IT executives since its growth represents what some may consider "shadow IT." "Web 2.0 is a revolution," says Stowe Boyd, a consultant on social technologies and business and a senior consultant with Cutter Consortium. "It challenges a lot of base assumptions people have about how to operate in the world."

Or how the world is supposed to operate. Unlike what IT executives are used to, "Web 2.0 technologies are coming in from the consumer space, and it's an interesting reversal," says John Hagel, longtime Web 2.0 consultant and chairman of an upcoming Deloitte research center on Web 2.0 and other technologies. The norms, standards and mindset of the Web 2.0 crowd are quite different from the typically older current C-suite, he says. "It will be increasingly difficult to enforce the ways of today's executives." Think of it like this: What would life be like if you were suddenly forbidden to use either a cell phone or BlackBerry? That's the equivalent of banning Web 2.0's tools to those who rely on them.

This problem will be more pronounced when what you might call the Collaboration Generation moves from colleges to corporations. As they have been weaned on the immediacy of texting, innocent of life sans cell phone, and perfectly fine with putting it all out there on MySpace, the rules and timing of information sharing are guaranteed to change with their arrival into the workforce. People will come into the company having always used Web 2.0 tools, says Sylvia Marino, executive director of Edmunds' CarSpace.com. They'll find a wiki easy for working in coordination with other organizations, for example. And they're not going to want to set up a half-hour meeting when they can just IM. CIOs need to embrace these technologies in order to optimize the efforts of both the next generation as well as the one already in the workforce, she says. "Not considering [Web 2.0 tools] is like saying we're not considering e-mail. It's another mode of communication that you can use for streamlining, outreach and information gathering."

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