Practice Before You Preach
Posted by Ajay Kolhatkar
The earlier post is a good example of what is not a blog.
. It obviously didn't come out as one had expected it to be. It reads more like a news article, or for that matter even an "advertorial". While the intention was to share one's experience in sharing the Infosys research with senior folks from Fortune 1000 organizations, it does seem to have converted into a news article and lost that personal sharing tone. I was actually talking about this kind of a faux pas in the same workshop. Some attendees of the workshop talked about how some of their employees can not make out the difference between a news insert and a blog and I had said that if we approach blogosphere with the same mindset as that of a PR and Corporate Communications these kind of blunders are bound to happen. And just to prove me right, they happened with me. 
Anyways lessons learnt and we are ready to move ahead. This time I would like to share some questions raised and discussions around the same.
Several interesting questions came up. Many of them dealt with the controls and regulations around corporate internet access. Many attendees accepted that changes happening in the WWW would really be influential, yet conceded that their organizations had strict controls over access to social media and networking sites from their corporate network. Other questions dealt with the cultural readiness required at corporate level to adopt some of these changes. And then there were the regular questions about how to deal with security and privacy issues.
Let me share my views and some discussions on the first question.
While many of the restrictions are attributed to the inherent security risks as well as burdens on the network traffic, they do impose serious restrictions on the employee’s, and in turn the organizations’ awareness about the game changing shifts happening in the marketplace. Many organizations are blissfully unaware of how separated they are from their customers and how fast smaller, yet nimble, players are taking their customers away.
So the fact that smaller players will adopt some of these technologies first is a given, because that is how they will create a niche for themselves and then battle it out with the goliaths. However, as Louis Gerstner of IBM puts it “Who says Elephants can’t Dance”. When the large organizations do see the impact of emerging technologies they adopt it, either by developing things in-house or simply by acquiring the nimble players. And we have seen this happen time and again (for example Google’s acquisition of YouTube).
During the presentation, one of the attendees, a senior person representing a very respectable financial services company, after attentively listening to all that i had to say, asked, “We understand some of this is important, but our organization has strict restrictions on social networking and media sites, so how do you think things will evolve given such restrictions”. My simple answer was that they will have no choice but to adopt these disruptive changes if they have to grow. I then cited half a dozen or so pure online financial services providers like www.zopa.com ; www.communitylend.com; and www.wesabe.com who are dramatically changing the rules of the game. While things are still in their infancy and we have a long way to go as far as issues about security and financial soundness of such concepts, the fact remains that it has caught the interest of some people who are willing to take the risk to be those early movers.
I will share some more discussions and insights in my subsequent post.
