System One - A serious mistake

Journal entry
Written by Michael Schuster on December 19 09:49

I guess it was rather surprising for most people when the Time Magazine announced its pick for the person of the year, being "You" meaning the anonymous Internet User, that brought along some change in how we interact with the web, not only last year, but in the past years, but 2006 definitely made something of that ongoing change visible.

Now Andrew McAfee once agains applies the statements that the Time journalists made, to the Enterprise 2.0, saying:

The article doesn't mention Enterprise 2.0 -- the application of Web 2.0 tools, approaches, and philosophies within organizations, but the quotes above are as relevant for the Intranet as for the Internet.

If you're a business leader and you're not just a little bit curious about Enterprise 2.0, why not? Do you not want your organization to become any more lateralized, searchable, multi-voiced or self-organizing? Do technologies that help put into practice managerial philosophies other than command-and-control make you uncomfortable?

Or are you completely happy with how people in your company intersect and interact? Do they have all the tools they need to do so?

Or do you think that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are currently too insecure, unstable, expensive, hard to install, and/or hard to use to
be worth the bother?

Or do you think that there's really nothing new under the sun? Are you so tired of IT hype that you've simply stopped listening?

That, I think, would be a serious mistake.

Nothing more to add.

2 comments on this yet, add yours.

Comment by Julian 1320 days ago:

I really liked reading this blog before the recent flurry of overly enthusiastic articles praising slightly dated hype technology. Enterprise 2.0? You must be kidding. Bring back Dirk Baecker.

Comment by Michael Schuster 1319 days ago:

Sorry for bringing in a different perspective, but I don't think that the technology that McAfee means is dated at all. If you call it Enterprise 2.0 or Whatever 2.0, the fact stays the same, that something is changing in the way we work with IT systems. And there is nothing about praising that technology, but only thinking and talking about what that change could imply and what it needs to implement that kind of change. And that is just another side of the coin that Dirk Baecker wrote about and will write in the future.

And what that particular post meant, was exactly that: if you skip thinking about what is currently happening, just because you're tired of buzzwords or convinced that this is just a short period that will pass by, I don't think that is the truth. But I would be happy to hear your opinion on that.

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