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Web 2.0 technologies were a key topic of discussion Friday at IBM Corp.'s Venture Partnering Symposium, but company executives and many of the venture capitalists in attendance confessed they were challenged to understand how services like YouTube and Facebook Inc. would fit into formal corporate settings. Anant Jhingran, vice president and chief technology officer of information management at IBM's software group, said that the company was highly interested in the collaborative opportunities arising from so many Web 2.0 services. However, some VCs said Jhingran misunderstood the creativity of Web 2.0 when he suggested that corporations could fit it to their purposes by adding more controls to these services and applications. The fundamental issue is that Web 2.0 services tend to be somewhat anarchic, putting more control in the hands of the individuals who create the content, while removing the filtering and formatting that large companies tend to prefer. Yet Web 2.0 is here to stay, and its offerings are likely to be used for business purposes with or without a company's official stamp of approval. One industry analyst at the symposium, for instance, shared how she had been informally advised to promote an upcoming conference on the social networking site Facebook when looking for the best place to reach a lot of professional contacts. "You can say this isn't an appropriate place to do business, but all these people are doing it," she said. Still Jhingran said that entrepreneurs and investors are naive to think large enterprises would just welcome Web 2.0 services into their networks without demanding some measure of oversight and control. While many rejected and even mocked his mantra of "creativity with control," Jhingran said the real challenge was to identify the happy medium between the two that would make these services appropriate for the corporate world without stifling creativity. "Enterprises tend to be more conservative, and anyone who stands up here and tells me they will not demand control, is not talking to the same people that I'm talking to." - Andrea Orr See July 6 story from TheDeal.com
Comments
From: Andrea Orr,
Thanks for your comments, Lauren. And I suspect, when companies keep too much control, more and more corporate information will move informally to more open sites such as Facebook. You mention that you wouldn't post confidential information on Facebook; I think the challenge is that so many people are able to do just that, and might even have incentive to do so. ... It's an interesting challenge.
Posted on:
October 10, 2007 5:25 PM
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Talking about "Creativity with Control" is something that is looked at and commented on in a variety of different ways, especially when dealing with the enterprise. Above, you comment on how:
"The fundamental issue is that Web 2.0 services tend to be somewhat anarchic, putting more control in the hands of the individuals who create the content, while removing the filtering and formatting that large companies tend to prefer."
This is true, and that is the creativity part, which I think is great. Giving the employees ability to create and build new applications to better serve their organizations not only increases productivity, but it offsets IT app backlog.
The issue here is that there has to be some sort of control to make sure that the information or data going into these Web 2.0 applications is safe. And by safe I mean that it has to be somewhat protected (from malicious or outdated information) and standardized, etc. If people are building Web 2.0 applications and mashups that rely on critical data, control is definitely needed. There also has to be a checkpoint to make sure that the information isn't being exposed to individuals or external teams that could use this information to harm folks' companies.
It's a fine line with creativity and control, and there has to be some balance (which I think folks are still figuring out) but that said, when looking at it from the enterprise perspective, they are going to need that control for their own security. And if they implement Web 2.0 the right way, they won't be stifling employee creativity.
As to Facebook, it is a totally separate ballgame. I use Facebook, and I promote events on there and attend events promoted on there. But do I post critical information that is enterprise confidential? No way. And that's what we have to be aware of moving forward.
For more information, check out Anant's blog on this topic: http://jhingran.typepad.com/anant_jhingrans_musings/2007/10/creativity-vs-c.html
Feel free to hit me with any questions too. As I said, we're still shaping this and it would be great to get feedback.
Cheers,
Lauren Cooney
IBM CTO Office