A comment on the Enterprise 2.0 panel:
The way I see it, the new collaborative technologies are coming in the backdoor. CFOs don’t give their CIOs budget to implement new stuff. CIOs only have the freedom to pay for “must-haves.” Even if CIOs did have budget, they can’t fully understand what the company departments need.
Business managers have much smaller budgets, but they’re much more flexible budgets than the IT budget. And the business managers have corporate credit cards. The business manager can buy the software that helps her team work better and the controller doesn’t bat an eye when a department spends and extra $10K. If the CIO spent $10K per business manager, the CFO would freak out. If every business manager spends $10K, it looks like a general cost increase (uncontrollable).
I expect we’ll see collaborative technologies like JotSpot, WebEx, and Salesforce.com purchased by business managers who value them. Once the CFO learns every department has an account, he’ll direct the CFO to consolidate the accounts and negotiate a better rate. It’ll be a change he can forecast and budget for so the financial analyst who got stuck with IT doesn’t get reamed in the close meeting for the next financial period.
That’s exactly the tactic that Salesforce.com has been taking and they’re taking over like gangbusters. It’s interesting that many of their customers are mid-size firms or groups within larger companies.
A danger in this approach is aggregating disparate systems. It’s fine if separate groups within an organization all use JotSpot. The CIO can then take all the content and put it together into a comprehensive knowledge management / collaboration system. However, what if some groups use JotSpot and others use SocialText and still others go with an open source version? There are reasons why you have a central IT staff and having groups go off in different directions (or even the fear that they might) could stifle adoption.
There’s also an opportunity here for the IT department to embrace the chaos and make some of these tools, or customize open source stuff. Instead of having rebels and mavericks within the department sneak around and plot for the revolution, they ought to be sought out by CIOs and encouraged to play. Then, you’re not talking about $100k, right?
Sometimes I think Doc Searls was just a little too early with his DIY IT idea.