Social Glass

I’m very optimistic about Enterprise 2.0 and actively seek to promote it internally and externally. We use social collaboration tools for projects, proposals, price lists, user groups, minutes etc. in a very ad hoc, non-official way. The result, and this is largely because we’ve bypassed IT for all of this by procuring domain names and servers outside the firewall, is I have 9 different systems to login to to collaborate on different topics. Each system essentially represents a loosely defined context boundary (i.e. project). This becomes very confusing for me and other users. And I’m sick and tired of setting up accounts on each of these systems every day.

This is what happens when we bypass IT to generate our “Enterprise 2.0 emergent collaboration platforms”. In light of a recent post by Andrew McAffee and another by Shiv Singh, IT does play a significant role within an organization (especially a large organization), and we need to embrace this to avoid the collaboration hell that I’m in. Misguided though they may be, I’d much rather transition the administration of our collaboration systems to IT. Let them provision new users. Let them backup the data. Let them schedule outages for upgrades.