I love this recent post from RWW - talking about the recent Gartner research report and emerging trends for CIO's - in particular the first point that is raised is something call technology populism; here is the excerpt from the post....
Technology Populism: Web 2.0 and social networking in the enterprise. Workers are provisioning their own tools, especially when IT can't provide. IT had best look towards integrating Enterprise 2.0 into their organization - if they don't, the end users will simply go find their own apps to use. The risks of ignoring this trend include compromised security, comprised privacy, and poor control of intellectual property. (We discussed this concept in more detail here).
........ and I now realise that this is essentially my attitude to CIO tools in my work area - if they are not available easily from internal IT why not just use the tools on the web. I have never really had a name for it before, but once you are exposed to things like google doc's, google reader, delicious, twitter, yahoo pipes and the list goes on why would you even bother to try and recreate such things inside the firewall. I just don't understand the reticence, well I do - everyone is worried about security etc, but for most things the security offered by web services is more then sufficient, and sometimes superior to what can be provided by internal ICT that there is no argument.
The other point I will make about this is that there is not widespread adoption of the web2.0 ethic about sharing everything with everyone - well not quite that free, but a lot more transparent then is currently the case inside govt firewalls...some of my colleagues call me a digital hippy, which I did not really understand until the free love reference was made clear to me, and in some ways that what web2.0 is about... in some ways. Technology populist - I can live with that!
