A quick video snippet from the conference can be found below (enjoyable to watch over morning coffee). Some comments:
Ross makes a point on "enterprise 2.0 tools" changing organizational culture. While there is clearly an co-relationship between tools and cultural change, tools themselves do not change culture. You can throw blogs out there and see them succeed or fail - there is no defacto guarantee of cultural change. Cultural change does not rest with technology alone - other methods and practices that address organizational dynamics are equally (I would argue more) important. Change is a complex choreography and as new ways of doing things takes shape, new tools are one facet of that emergence. So tools can indeed help enable all types of transformation (expected and unexpected), but there is no silver bullet, you need to do more than deploy technology.
Matthew makes a point on groups and collaboration as if the concept is brand new. Hello. Group collaboration as been around for some time and has been addressed by a variety of tools (such as Lotus Notes). We need to learn from history (or in the case of Google, perhaps at least be aware of it and offer an informed opinion). Now, times are changing and software is evolving. We are (slowly) doing a better job at designing tools that support different collaboration models, including interactions that are more loosely coupled, community-oriented, network-centric and more supportive of social interaction (e.g., blogs, wikis, feeds, tagging, etc.). But we need to place things in context and look at the changing design point of collaboration tools over the past 20 years.
Executives discuss how the modern Web is impacting IT
At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, ZDNet Editor in Chief Dan Farber talks to Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText; Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise; and Satish Dharmaraj, CEO of Zimbra, about why CIOs are starting to implement Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.
[...] As the Burton Group's Mike Gotta has written: "Change is a complex choreography [...]
Posted by: jg21 | May 06, 2007 at 05:46 AM