Social media is being brought into the corporate world and information technology departments will have figure out how to make it strategically important to their companies.
So says Clay Shirky, a NYC professor, consultant, author and watcher of Internet trends, writes Larry Dignan at ZDNet.
Shirky, speaking recently at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, addressed a room full of technology executives and said he didn’t want to tell CIOs how to do their jobs, but did scare them enough for them to take the hint that they needed to “get” social media as soon as possible.
Instead of preaching the merits of social media to business, the NYU professor put Facebook, Twitter and other tools in historical context. Shirky’s take: Consumerisation has been going on forever and IT departments everywhere have made technologies useful to business.
Shirky set up his history lesson noting that access to information has now been democratised. Now people form networks and share information everywhere. Social networking is a cultural change that will affect IT. The bright side is that technology execs have seen these drastic changes before.
“For the IT department these changes are familiar,” explained Shirky. “The change brought about by social media for business is like when the PC came to the enterprise in the 1990s. The PC came to the enterprise because the accountants hated the mainframe guys. Instead of going down the hall for a batch job, they brought in PCs, Lotus and VisiCalc.”
He continued and noted that the laptop didn’t make it to the enterprise because some C-level execs thought it was a great idea to take their PCs home in a bag. Road warriors demanded laptops.
Email? “If you asked any business in the middle of the 1990s about email you’d get something between ‘we’re thinking about it’ and ‘what is it?’” What changed? Enterprises noted that AOL email addresses were being put on business cards.
Today, there’s the hardware and software integration trend ushered in by Apple and all of those iPads consumers are bringing to work.
Shirky’s message is that social media isn’t all that different. Workers are bringing Facebook and Twitter to work because they need better collaboration tools. And the longer it takes for enterprises to get social media the harder it is to make it strategic. Shirky warned that businesses can’t dismiss social networking as something frivolous. The reality is that social media just hasn’t been pressed into more serious duty yet.
“Social media is being dragged into the business environment right now,” said Shirky. “It will fall to the IT department—like it always does—to render these social threats and opportunities into something strategic.”
Source: FourFiveOne
http://SocialBusinessToday.net - The Best in Social Business
No comments:
Post a Comment