Enterprise Wikis Seen As a Way to End 'Reply-All' E-Mail Threads
Socialtext's president and co-founder talks about wikis as an enterprise collaboration tool and what wikis mean to companies, their IT departments, and a whole new generation of workers.
This idea of user-empowerment seems to get at the friction we see between users, who love applications in the consumer space, and IT, who still might feel an inclination towards control. Do you agree this tension exists?
Mayfield: I actually think the consumerization of IT is one of the biggest changes that's going to have profound impact on your readership. I think it happens in a couple of ways. The rate of innovation in the consumer sphere on the Web far outpaces what's happening in the enterprise. What that means is that there's new models that are being created that can be adapted that can be tested, and that's the role that we [Socialtext] will play.
There are massive demographic shifts that are happening. It's not just that the baby boomers are leaving the workforce at this alarming rate, and we've got to get some of their knowledge to be left in the firm before they leave. Recruiting talent is harder than it ever was.
The net gens, the 16 to 24 year olds, have grown up using the Internet as part of their daily life. This generation, the biggest demographic shift in history, is going to profoundly impact the enterprise. These are the folks who grew up doing their homework on Facebook, and at school that was called cheating. And they come to the workforce and do the same thing and it's called collaboration. They grew up using social software. They've actually look down on email. They think email is only for formal legal business communication. They've got five to seven instant messaging windows open at any one time. They're blogging. They're on social network tools. They leverage Wikipedia as much as they can. And then they come to the workforce and they're given SAP.
The reality is, what they'll end up doing is working around it because they can with SaaS and open source. They can serve their own needs without IT's involvement, whether you've got a policy against it or not. The issue isn't people spending time on Facebook; the issue is for IT is, are you taking advantage of the tool? What are you learning about this generation and their preferences for tools? How can you manage them differently? If you can manage them differently, you'll get tremendous rewards because they have immense talent, interests, and a drive to connect with other people, form groups, and be creative.
