Thanks to the excellent Elektrischer Reporter, a Video podcast made by Mario Sixtus for the german newspaper Handelsblatt, I got the opportunity to muse about how Enterprises are going to change, what role networks play in that change and how software could help with that.

Today I stumbled upon a post that very much reflected a thing I said in the interview:

It’s ironic that enterprise business units (without the permission of the IT department, perhaps) are starting to subscribe to services like Basecamp, which was built by the inventor of RoR, and yet the IT departments in these companies turn their noses up at RoR.

That is very true and really puzzling. How long are enterprises going to withstand the pressure from their employees that illegally install tools, use external services and setup things like wikis without caring about corporate security policies or the like? I hear from so many people who are not happy with the applications that they have, that it is very likely that those who are eager to work with efficient, slim tools are going to find a workaround and (even worse from a company viewpoint) introduce that to their colleagues and to other teams.

Some software vendors like IBM are making good moves in offering solutions that at least sound like those that you'd find out on the Internet, although the resulting implementation is still much more like traditional Enterprise software than a real Web application.