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The Web 2.0/social media revolution inches along

More evidence this week that the Web 2.0/social media revolution may be advancing, but it ain’t here yet:

  • Instant messaging hasn’t become the preferred method of communication among IT staff; nor has texting. We have Robert Half to thank for these insights: Of the 1,400 CIOs who took its recent survey, 79% cited email or phone as the preferred forms of communication among their staff.

OK, I’m being a little facetious. It’s hardly likely that decades-old ways of communicating in the corporate world will be swept away overnight, if ever, by technologies like these. IM and texting have their workplace functions, but they won’t replace email anytime soon. (Wikis and collaboration platforms might be another story… but they weren’t part of this survey.)

  • Speaking of collaboration, that’s the oft-touted benefit of social networking platforms tailored for the enterprise. But having employees who like social networks such as Facebook or having developers enthusiastic to build something like it in-house doesn’t mean you’re ready to hop on the bandwagon. In fact, if you don’t have a company culture of collaboration, attempting to create one with Web 2.0 tools won’t work, warned experts at the AMR Research Business Technology Conference this week.

One practitioner who’s learned this lesson is Jason Harrison. He was involved in an effort to roll out a collaboration platform at an advertising agency. Though some 400 employees had joined a company Facebook group, the in-house effort failed. “We took it for granted that the workforce wanted to collaborate, and we were wrong,” he says.

Today, an implementation of SharePoint and NewsGator at another agency, Universal McCann, has proved much more successful for Harrison, who is now worldwide CIO for Mediabrands, a unit of Interpublic. Employees can search for documents to use in their client pitches, they easily picked up on how to tag content, and everyone can see the hottest content and most active users, he says.

  • I liked some comments from AMR analyst Jonathan Yarmis, vice president of disruptive technologies. He called social technologies the “next wave of computing, building on task and process automation.” The workplace, he said, will be “transformed” over the next five years. And I’m sure the technical capabilities – in unified communications, document sharing and wikis, to name a few types of systems – will advance and seep into the way we all do our jobs.

But to embrace the large-scale change he infers, using existing and future tools to their capacity, probably involves some business process analysis, some supply chain analysis, some workflow automation. And that’s no small stuff. So let’s be glad we have time to really figure out what our business needs and if social media can provide it. While we should welcome the advancing Web 2.0 army, let’s be thankful it’s not here yet.

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