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.
Comments
The issues raised are very relevant. However, I do not think it is too hard to get in there. It would be really unwise of these big enterprises to wait for startups or open source folks to come up with advance level security frameworks, which could probably support the openness as web2.0 boosts off. In that respect, its good to see the stiff competition between IT Majors like IBM or Google or MS or Yahoo (add Amazon, Adobe, etc too) to come up with better models of mashups or frameworks. In particular, I was pleased to see Intel, a company not so known for its IT adventures, is pushing sm web2 initiatives (http://coolsw.intel.com/) as well.
Posted by: Shaurabh Bharti | April 15, 2008 05:00 PM
While the companies listed in your comments are leaders in their respective fields, the other commonality is that they also have a major stake in the development / usage of the new web. In fact some of these are at the forefront of technologies leading to the new WWW experience. So it is not surprising to see these companies taking the lead.
The companies I was referring to in the earlier post are large, brick and mortar giants, who have been in business for several decades and are yet to catch up with the changes in their consumer’s preferences. Infact some of the companies might be dealing exclusively with customers who may not have been affected by the changes in the WWW experience. These customers always had experiences created for them due to their exclusivity.
But the point about not waiting for the small startups to provide the answers to problems about security and business models is valid. Companies like Progressive (Insurance), Wells Fargo (Financial Services) and BBC (media) have already taken the lead in adopting the next generation of Web and how?
Posted by: Ajay Kolhatkar | May 7, 2008 03:33 PM