While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern - at least at Brown - was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative.

In the case of the Google Apps glitch, which began on Friday, September 11th, a couple of students notified Brown's Computing and Information Services department (CIS) that they were able to read emails belonging to other students. The CIS department contacted Google on the following day and sent out an email to the 200 students whose mailboxes were in transition, asking them whether or not they were experiencing the same problem. Some were. The affected students could either see entire inboxes belonging to another classmate or, in other cases, saw less than 100 messages that did not belong to them.

In the end, only 22 out of the 200 students were affected, but the fix was not put into place until Tuesday. That means that the students had access to each other's email accounts for three solid days (Saturday, Sunday, Monday) as well as parts of Friday and Tuesday before the accounts were suspended by Google.

Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable, according to Tom, who, reports Brown's daily newspaper, "praised Google for its prompt response." (We don't know about you, but if someone else could read our email for three days, we wouldn't exactly call that "prompt.")

Massive data migrations are no small feat and Google's slip-up in this case is certainly not the first nor the last time that something has gone wrong. Still, Google is notably concerned when problems like this happen. "It was a small hiccup along the way and it's an issue we've taken extremely seriously," said Google's Rajan Sheth.

The Real Problem Wasn't Email, it was Lack of Communication

However, the real issue that concerned the university was the matter of communication between Google and the CIS department. Before fixing the issue on Tuesday, Google suspended the affected accounts, a necessary step that was taken so no more data was improperly shared. What angered the IT director, though, was that the accounts were suspended without first notifying CIS.

"I've spoken very forcefully with the account (executive), my boss, senior administrators at Brown -- including the president. (Google needs) to find a better way to communicate with us," said Tom.

When considering a move to a cloud service, most companies and institutions focus on how the change will affect budgets and the bottom line. They also think about data conversion issues and possible needs for re-training in some cases. However, one of the things that doesn't come up as often is exactly how communication will take place between the business and the company involved. Sure, companies may discuss the procedures (use this form, this phone number) and uptime guarantees, but they can't possibly imagine every scenario and spell out how they want the cloud provider to perform.

No longer can company execs just stroll into the I.T. guy (or gal's) office and cry out "my email is messed up!" Now there are a few more hoops to jump through. And whether it's Google or someone else, the interactions that take place and the way the issues are addressed will be a learning experience on both ends.

In reality, open-source software provides stable solutions, created by people and for people and used by companies of all sizes. Use Firefox? That's open-source software. Google Chrome? It too is based on an open-source code. Ever look up a term on Wikipedia? The site is completely built on user-generated code and content. "In fact," says Allison Randal, Program Chair of OSCON, "chances are you're using a lot more open-source software than you know: on your computer or powering you favorite websites."

Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com -- a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and social media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

What Is Open Source?

"The ideas behind open source are about freedom," continues Randal, "that people should have certain basic rights in the software that they use, the same as every other part of life. It's about people's rights to create things they're passionate about."

Mozilla's founders, who spawned Firefox, walked away from the ashes of Netscape with a desire to change the Web browsing experience. Drupal and Joomla are content management systems that enable unlimited options in website building and publishing. Remember how difficult it used to be to build your own website? Now building one is free, open to all, flexible, and extendable: anyone with a passion or idea can build for it, and numerous companies are taking Drupal and Joomla and building easy-to-use website templates that anyone can use, no programming needed. Don't want to pay for Microsoft Office? You can use OpenOffice for free -- it will serve most of your needs.

In essence, these projects, developers, and organizations address mature, business-critical issues in better, faster ways. This form of crowd-sourcing enables businesses to use solutions that would otherwise have required a lot more time and/or people to develop at a much higher total cost.

Open Source Is Evolving

You may have heard the phrase, "Open Source is free as in speech, not as in beer." This phrase refers to the notion that while everyone can freely start and contribute to any project, the actual use of open source solutions may still come with a price tag -- often for services and additional product layers that a company bundles with the open code. But for corporations that already spend millions of dollars just to keep the lights on, investing in open source increasingly makes better business sense. For the CIOs and CTOs of these companies, it's not about the price tag of each solution but rather about the total cost of ownership over time, especially in a downturn economy.

In a study conducted by Gartner and reported by Matt Asay at CNET, CIOs reported they have increased investment in open-source software and decreased investment in proprietary software. CIOs reported that by investing in open source they were able to do the following:

• Reduce costs by 87% (while meeting or exceeding expectations),
• Improve quality by 92%,
• Ease integration and customization by 86%,
• Quicken pace of innovation by 82%,
• Improve support by 84%,
• Increase standards compliance by 91%,
• Decrease time to market by 82%.

Michael Fauscette, Group Vice-President of Software Business Solutions at IDC, recently highlighted changes in the adoption of open source. IDC found that as recently as 2007, CIOs were reluctant to adopt social media software for fear of IP infringement and poor support: two mission-critical elements of any enterprise. By 2008, says Fauscette, CIOs reported that they preferred open-source software precisely because of the quality of support it comes with. And as for their fear of IP infringement, that was no longer at the top of the list because of standards and self-policing.

Open source doesn't only serve IT companies, though. It is now being explored for government and health care data management and access. Open-source software, in other words, has moved from the basements of Linkin Park fans to the desks of the largest corporations in the US.

Sound familiar? The evolution of open source may sound a bit like the evolution of another web-related phenomenon, what has become known as Web 2.0 social media and social networking. Like open-source software, social media is about the basic human right to communicate, organize, and maintain control of one's own experiences. And both address the needs of companies to do more at higher quality with less money. Both social media and open-source software involve communities and are fed by content: code in the case of open source, and media content in the case of social media.

But unlike open source, social media has thus far primarily been a consumer play and is only now being explored by enterprises. Living on the Web, social media is also hardware and distribution-channel agnostic: it does not require pre-installation and does not compete with pre-bundled proprietary products. Historically, open source, being hardware dependent, has had greater distribution challenges: unless the software came pre-loaded on your hardware, notes Fauscette, you would rarely seek out alternatives to replace what you already have. Without a channel for hardware, distribution was driven primarily by hard-core tech enthusiasts.

Seeds of Change

Companies that erected insurmountable barriers to protect their source code now realize that the cost of innovation and competition may be just too much compared to that of their competitors that use open-source software. Take Google's Android, an iPhone competitor built on the open-source platform Linux. Android started off as closed-source software but very quickly became an open-source project. Developers can now build applications on top of Android's platform and then use the code for their own Android-like products, just as developers use Firefox code to build their own browsers.

2008 saw another significant milestone: the establishment of the Symbian Foundation to oversee the development of the Symbian operating system as an open-source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). The Foundation's members include Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T. With this development, a once highly protected closed-source cell-phone operating system has opened up.

Caleb Sima, Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard, calls this "a clear move on Nokia's part to try to catch up to the competition by using open source and the community to help evolve its features to those of smartphones." Companies are now realizing that open-source software is a competitive advantage.

What Open Source Means to Social Media

Open source is the natural platform for fast-evolving social media and social networking. Forget about having to scale the walled gardens of social networks or having to upload, download, and link together multiple applications. With open source, everything is seamless and transparent. Picture a huge festive dinner table, set with dozens of mouth-watering dishes for you and your guests to pick from. You can heap whatever you like on your plate or, better yet, just dab your bread into whatever dish your please, all while seeing what others are putting on their plate and seeing whether they're using a fork or a spoon and hearing the conversation around the table.

But with all of these capabilities and openness, people will face new challenges on the Web. One big challenge will be to make the Web more personal and make it possible to simulate live interaction. One of the most promising companies to address this is Kaltura, maker of the only open-source online video management platform, with a free community platform, now used on over 35,000 websites and soon to be integrated into Wikipedia for user co-creation of rich media content. (Disclaimer: Kaltura is one of my client companies.)

"Extensions like Kaltura make the Web real," says Fauscette. "Video is in fact one of the big things we'll see. This is an opportunity space, and first-mover advantage will be big." For Fauscette, trust is a major sticking point: with the proliferation of networks, friends, followers, and brands online, helping people figure out who and what to trust will be key to making the Web personal.

Whoever tries to control people's relationships will lose. Whoever enables people to create and share experiences that are relevant to them across any website, with anyone, the way they want will win. And open source will create many more winners than losers.

More About Open Source

OSCON is celebrating its 10th year anniversary this coming week in a four-day conference in San Jose, California. In addition to the usual technical tracks, OSCON has added people and business tracks and many free events. You can register for a free pass to the expo hall (yes, free as in beer) and attend the "Birds of a Feather" un-conference, Ignite party, Hackathon, and much more (all free). Check out the list of events.

Great resources online include Open Source Initiative Open Government, Open Data Initiatives, SourceForge (where you can find a list of ongoing projects and downloads), Open Video Alliance, and the excellent short and sweet write-ups by open-source experts such as CNET's Matt Asay.

Oh, and there's always Wikipedia (where smiles are always open).

A company called FaceTime Communications, based in Belmont, California, recently introduced their new inspection and classification technology called "ACE," which simply stands for Application Control Engine. This patented security technology is capable of scanning a network and identifying more than 1400 Web 2.0 applications and more than 50,000 social networks widgets distributed by sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut.

Scanning for rogue applications on the network is nothing new for I.T., but what's interesting about FaceTime's ACE technology is its focus on scanning for the technologies that often fly under I.T.'s radar: web apps.

The Danger of Web 2.0 Behind the Firewall

As we've mentioned before, I.T.'s failure to adapt to the changing needs of their user base, now younger and more digitally savvy than ever before, has led to a lot of self-provisioning of the easy-to-use applications found on the web. These tools can include anything from Facebook groups to standalone apps like the SharePoint-lite team pages found on Google Sites.

Of course, when users become their own I.T. department, they're unknowingly introducing inherent risks into the previously hardened network infrastructure. Just because a web app is easy to operate, that doesn't make it safe and secure for enterprise use. As users upload and share sensitive files through these unapproved backchannels or have business-related conversations through web-based IM chatrooms, they might not only be putting their company's data at risk, they could also be breaking various compliance laws as well. 

The Difficulty of Monitoring Web Apps in the Enterprise

For I.T., the challenge is keeping up with the barrage of new web apps out there and shutting down those that present a threat. In an independent study commissioned by FaceTime Communications, 62% of I.T. respondents said that there were eight or more Internet applications installed on their enterprise networks - a 300% increase over the first study conducted in 2005. More importantly, the respondents noted that about one-third of their users downloaded the applications they wanted to use - regardless of company policy. Those apps were a mix between apps for business and those used for personal reasons.

I.T. has traditionally struggled to shut down many of today's web applications because they are not all strictly browser-based. Knowing that their adoption rate is dependent on behind-the-back installs on company desktops, many of the apps make sure they can't be blocked by a URL signature. The apps may also masquerade themselves as HTTP, FTP, SMTP and Telnet traffic while exhibiting evasive techniques that help them penetrate the company firewall and escape detection by the current crop of Unified Threat Management systems.

With FaceTime's ACE, though, more than 1,400 of these web applications can be identified and even more social networking widgets can be isolated, too. Those apps can be discovered and shut down regardless of the port, protocol, or evasive technique they use. In addition, the ACE software developers kit (SDK) allows third party solution providers the ability to extend their offerings in order to help their customers manage instant messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing, social networking, Web 2.0, voice-over-IP, anonymizers, IPTV, multimedia, games, virtual worlds, and unified communications. 

What This Means for Enterprise 2.0

If FaceTime's ACE or other similar technologies become a mainstay in the enterprise I.T. toolkit, the explosion of Web 2.0 for business use, a trend typically called Enterprise 2.0, may be dealt quite a blow. The only Enterprise 2.0 apps that will succeed given that scenario will be the ones that worked with the I.T. admins from the very beginning to assure them of their safety. The apps reliant on a slew of the company's rule-breaking users for adoption, however, will be out of luck. Perhaps being sneaky may not have been a great business model after all.

While systems and software used to be very "behind the scenes" and often transaction-based, that is the case no longer. Consumers and businesses alike buy differently, consume differently, and recommend differently. Trends such as social networking, video on demand, and e-commerce will continue to force businesses to adapt to keep up with their customers. They cannot rely on systems that take years to implement, and most don't have the budgets to make large investments, at least they won't for the next couple of years.

The growing focus on SaaS, cloud computing, application platforms, etc. are all responses to this growing trend in the market. There will be other solutions in the future for mobile, etc. that we haven't even imagined. They all drive businesses to use systems that they can deploy, change, and retire quickly. In my main job, I remember meeting a venture capitalist who talked about how his firm looks for opportunities in which it sees lots of "wiggling." He couldn't describe what that really meant, or how one gets paid for wiggling. I thought he was a lunatic.

In retrospect, he does make a good point. Things happen quickly on the Internet and in this changing global economy. When a business sees wiggling (or opportunities), either positive or negative, they need agile systems to respond. One-size-fits-all software and packaging are going the way of the VCR. I think this will continue to grow in importance and focus as enterprises evaluate new systems and invest in new technology. What do you think?

Recently, HP and research firm IDC took a look at some of the biggest trends they're seeing in the datacenter. These five hot new trends are having a big impact on computing today and the future of the cloud. But which ones are most important?

1) Blades

Blades will account for 29% of server sales by 2012. This market is growing quickly as customers are realizing the benefits of a bladed infrastructure: that is, space, time, cost and energy savings. Both enterprise and midsize customers are being impacted by this trend. (Source: IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Forecast, 2008Q1)

2) Going Green

Going green is less about being environmentally conscious and more about saving money. CIOs and IT managers are surprised to find that creating an energy-efficient, high-performance data center through power and cooling is much less expensive they they anticipated. The end result of going green is a reduction in overall costs (energy, space requirements, management, etc) which is savings businesses some serious dollars. 

3) Virtualization

By 2011 more than half of customers' workloads will be deployed in virtual machines. With every new advancement in this area, like integrated hypervisors for example, the need to intelligently control the data center is strengthened. Data center managers need to know how to build a unified infrastructure combining both the virtual and physical environments.  (Source: IDC Multiclient Study, Server Virtualization On the Move 2007)

4) Cloud Computing Means Scalability Is a Must

Data is growing at an exponential rate thanks to cloud computing. Large content-rich data, like streaming digital media (e.g. IPTV, video on demand, broadcast, etc.), static digital media (e.g. photo sharing, online music download, etc.), and web content hosting (e-mail, blogs, Web pages, etc.) are having the most impact. Cloud computing companies need solutions that can easily manage multi-petabyte scalability - without disruption.

5) Linux in the Enterprise

Worldwide Linux server shipments have increased by 35% since 2003. Currently, one out of every five servers runs on Linux and the adoption of Linux servers is expected to grow. The adoption rate will increase by almost 8% by 2012  (Source: IDC, Worldwide Quarterly Server Forecast, 2008 Q1)

If you want to learn more about these trends using a real world example, HP's Pentel Case Study makes for a good read. This company was able to reduce their datacenter footprint from 5 full racks to 1 by using a combination of blades, storage, and VMWare virtualization. They were also able to reduce their power and cooling needs. Those efforts led to a savings of over $200,000 in three years in reduced maintenance costs alone. Their I.T. department is more agile, Oracle performs up to 80% faster, and they can deploy a server in minutes. In other words, these trends are just about changing needs, they're also about saving money.

Out of all these trends, which ones are most important? We tend to think that scalability is going to be a big issue going forward, especially with the growth of web apps and their specific infrastructure needs. We've already seen what lack of scalability can do to a service - we almost lost Twitter, for example, as demand outpaced their ability to provide the service. Knowing the intelligent audience of readers we have here at RWW, we're interested in what trends you think are the most important. 

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_big_data_center_trends_for_2008.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_big_data_center_trends_for_2008.php Trends Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:31:40 -0800 Sarah Perez New Dev Suite Lets LongJump Work With Other Apps

When LongJump first launched, the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) model was only just taking off. Since then, we've seen Google launch their App Engine and more services than ever are taking advantage of Amazon's EC2. Today, the Sunnyvale, California-based PaaS provider, LongJump, tries to one-up those big-name sites with the launch of their new LongJump Development Suite, a tool set that helps developers extend the power of LongJump by allowing interoperability with other systems and applications.

While this ease-of-use made LongJump ideal for enterprise I.T. teams looking for fast and easy ways to build and deploy apps, allowing those apps to interoperate with data from other applications and systems was not possible until now.

About The LongJump Development Suite

With the new LongJump Development Suite, an I.T. department can build the app they need, then use the included visual browser-based UI for data and process modeling. Alternately, they could instead choose to hand of the integration of the app with another system or application to a developer (or team of developers). Finding a developer to work with LongJump shouldn't be an issue since the suite provided is a Java-based development environment complete with a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment), something that's used by 69% of Java developers today. LongJump also provides a set of service integration points using SOAP and RESTful APIs to connect to other external systems.

Why LongJump?

Unlike both Google and Amazon, the focus with LongJump is on application creation, not just the delivery. When you build on Google or Amazon, you still need to know how to build - you need to know code. LongJump is focused on letting anyone build without code. They aren't the only ones thinking this is the next big trend for the web, either. Earlier this year, for example, we covered an app called Iceberg whose aim was to allow anyone to become a developer.

Will this trend take off? For enterprise I.T. organizations, their bottom-line focus is usually money and time. If PaaS offerings like these mean custom apps can be built quickly and easily without needing to hire outside dev teams, there's a good chance for their success. However, they do have to fight with a number of already decent solutions out there. Thanks to the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 movement, there are already a slew of business applications built and ready to go. These apps might not be perfect but are often they are often "good enough," and that's proven to be a good way to get in the door of the enterprise...just ask Google Docs.

During this transition, it's not "old with the old and in with the new" - several technologies from the prior period of innovation are still important. These include the following:

• Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) - middleware that enables new component apps
• Business Process Management (BPM) - user-driven automation of manual tasks
• Mobile - beyond laptops to cell phones and PDAs
• X Internet - RFID and sensors at the edge the net connects physical objects to the internet

New Trends CIO Should Care About

Keeping in mind that the above trends are not going away anytime soon, CIOs still need to be aware of the upcoming trends that will define the future of enterprise IT. In the "IT everywhere" wave, business technology (BT) is the driving factor. The control of this technology is being shifted away from IT and is increasingly under the control of the business organizations and the users themselves. Simply put, BT is the future of IT. When looking ahead to the future, Forrester recommends CIOs keep the following trends in focus:

1. Technology Populism: Web 2.0 and social networking in the enterprise. Workers are provisioning their own tools, especially when IT can't provide. IT had best look towards integrating Enterprise 2.0 into their organization - if they don't, the end users will simply go find their own apps to use. The risks of ignoring this trend include compromised security, comprised privacy, and poor control of intellectual property. (We discussed this concept in more detail here).
2. The Information Workplace: The information workplace is a term describing a next-gen platform that consists of numerous parts such as unified communications, portals, enterprise content management apps, office productivity apps, collaborative technologies, business intelligence, data warehousing, and more. However, the information workplace isn't about each of these technologies individually, but how they all seamlessly come together as a whole. Today's information workplace is role-based, individualized, and thanks to the Web 2.0 invasion, it's also often "social" and "quick," as Web 2.0 tools tend to be.
3. Dynamic Business Applications: These are component apps that target certain roles but change easily. Over the next five years, IT's goal is to develop enterprise software that adapts to the business and that's capable of evolving as the business grows. These apps are designed with a focus on the people who use them, but are also highly adaptable as the business changes over time.
4. Digital Business Architecture: This includes SOA, unified communications, and virtual computing among other things as a top-level conceptual model for planning the future of both technology and architecture. A digital business architecture means the design of your business is accurately reflected in your technology.
5. IT Ecosystems: By 2012, there will be a shift in the dominant form of IT delivery from buyers self-integrating technology to having outside providers assemble and manage it. Those with the strongest delivery capabilities will lead the way. This trend will also include a shift away from software investments based on ownership to those based on subscription as well as an increase in new IP sourced from open communities.
6. Enterprise Master Data Management: MDM focuses on delivering trusted data throughout the enterprise. Today the focus is on addressing cross-application data use and management while also considering MDM's multiyear and multiphase business capabilities. In 2008, information and knowledge management professional will work on overcoming the organizational, process, and business case challenges to bringing this data to the enterprise.

The most startling number to come out of this recent study - a survey of 260+ I.T. professionals - is that 63% are now expecting social technologies to impact the business world. Even more interesting is that they feel that the impact will be a positive one - only 3% of respondents viewed Web 2.0 negatively.

However, that's not to say they don't have their concerns. They are wary of one thing in particular: 79% are concerned about the risks of unsanctioned use of these tools by employees. Like we mentioned before, "tech populism" occurs when employees go behind I.T.'s back to provision their own tools from the ones freely available on the web. This opens up a whole new way to jeopardize sensitive company data.

I.T. To Lead The Way

To fight this trend, I.T. departments realize that must lead the way for Web 2.0 adoption and act as an enabler and facilitator of Web 2.0 tools. And this is where I.T. still holds the power - 80% of enterprises reported that funding the Web 2.0 deployments remained within the hands of I.T. This is most likely due to the fact that I.T. is still the major source for technological expertise within a company.

This news means that Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 technologies looking to gain a foothold in business, simply appealing to the CIO or one particular department (like Marketing or HR) won't be enough. Tech marketers looking for insights into how to embrace I.T. in order to gain acceptance should check out the Forrester report for more details and suggestions.

Adobe Launches Online Office Suite and New Flash-Enabled Acrobat 9

Back in March, we said that Adobe was slowly building an online empire. This week, that news turned out to be true. Adobe launched their version of an online office suite at Acrobat.com, complete with word processor (Buzzword), web conferencing/whiteboard app (ConnectNow), online file sharing (Share), file storage, (My Files), and PDF converter. To complement this launch, Adobe also announced a brand-new version of Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat 9, the biggest release since the initial one that introduced Acrobat to the world. The remarkable change in this new version is that Adobe is now incorporating Flash into the PDF experience.

Trouble at eBay

"I think [fixed prices] will disappear online, simply because it is possible - cheap and easy - to vary prices online." That was MIT Media Lab's Patti Maes in 1999, at a time when eBay's business was booming and auctions were seen as the future of ecommerce. Flash forward 9 years, and BusinessWeek this week called online auctions a dying breed, Nick Carr is wondering if auctions were a fad. Indeed, the fixed price ("Buy it Now" only) format is beginning to dominate eBay, and the company has taken recent steps push fixed price even harder. But the death knell of the online auction format is not eBay's biggest problem -- no, that would be the small exodus of sellers from the site.

Yahoo! Pushes Search Results Customization to Users

Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey platform got a little more public this week with the unveiling of the Search Gallery -- the platform's official application repository. The gallery has already been open to developers and curious bloggers for a couple of weeks, but Yahoo! is now pushing it to the public at large via a "Customize" drop down menu on all search results. In addition, starting this week developers can share applications via external links even if they haven't yet been approved for inclusion in the official gallery.

6 Great Tools to Save Links for Later

Unfortunately, there just aren't enough hours in the day. This seems to be especially true when you take on a lot of projects. Between blogging, researching, emailing, and real life, reading all of your feeds isn't something we can do all the time. Sometimes, we see something that we'd love to save it for later without cluttering up our bookmarks. Here are 6 tools to get the job done.

See also: RSS Reset: Dump Your Feeds for a Month

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

OpenWeb Asia: Opening the Asian Web to the World

Everyone working on the web around the world would like to connect with people in Asia, but it's not easy to do. That dynamic and populous region is often focused inward and it's made inaccessible to outsiders because there is so little information about what goes on there available in the web's dominant language, English. OpenWeb Asia is a new project that aims to change those trends.

See also: C-Shirt: Remixable T-shirts by Mobile Phone and Nico Nico Douga and the Simulation of Real Time (two Japanese web apps that Marshall checked out during his recent trip to Japan)

I.T. 2.0: How Changing Technology is Having Big Impacts on Business

In case you haven't heard yet - the I.T. world is changing. The rise of social computing technologies, generally branded as "Web 2.0" and including things like wikis, blogs, social networking, RSS, and more are slowly making their way into the business world. This new movement is called Enterprise 2.0, and it's no small shift. They're even having a conference about it next week. But the change encompasses more than just the introduction of new, social software into the formerly stodgy business world - it also includes the movement of server software from in-house data centers to the cloud, the rise of a mobile workforce, the rebirth of thin client computing, a self-provisioning user base, and more.

See also: Introducing the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad Finalists

The Numbers Are In, Live Video Online Is Blowing Up

Live video broadcasting service Ustream.tv announced this week that live feeds on the company's website and distributed video players got a combined 10 million unique viewers last month. That's a major validation of live streaming video on the web. When YouTube Live launches later this year, this medium is only going to get bigger.

See also: Watch Out TV: YouTube is Taking Over

Survey: 48% of Bank Customers Want Web 2.0 Gadgets

WorkLight, a startup that offers enterprise 2.0 products, recently did a survey among Facebook users to find out their willingness to use Web 2.0 tools for secure banking. The survey was conducted among 1000 Facebook users between the ages of 18-34. The fact that the survey was conducted among Facebook users gives it a bias towards tech-savvy people. However there are some surprising findings.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

In case you haven't heard yet - the I.T. world is changing. The rise of social computing technologies, generally branded as "Web 2.0" and including things like wikis, blogs, social networking, RSS, and more are slowly making their way into the business world. This new movement is called Enterprise 2.0, and it's no small shift. They're even having a conference about it next week. But the change encompasses more than just the introduction of new, social software into the formerly stodgy business world - it also includes the movement of server software from in-house data centers to the cloud, the rise of a mobile workforce, the rebirth of thin client computing, a self-provisioning user base, and more.

This next big shift is on the horizon, but you can see it coming. Today, there still may be plenty of businesses employing "classic geeks" in their I.T. Department, but that's about to change. Don't misunderstand - the world will always need a good engineer, but the I.T. leaders of tomorrow - the ones guiding the business in the use of their computer resources, the ones working with the CEOs to execute the vision and direction via information technology - they will no longer be what we think of as the classic "computer geek." You know the type - the stereotypical introvert, who's more comfortable behind the glow of computer screen than interacting with the rest of the human race. The one who likes to speak in acronyms that only he or she understands. The ones who know how to do everything from a command prompt. These folks will be a dying breed...at least around the office.

Instead, tomorrow's computer "geek" will be a true member of the business team as opposed to the mysterious man behind the curtain who you only notice when something goes wrong. So what does the "new geek" need to know to run tomorrow's I.T. Department? An entirely new skill set, as it turns out. Here's a short list, but feel free to add to it in the comments:

Enterprise 2.0

No, the CEO isn't going to walk up to you and say "Hey, I've been thinking we should deploy some Enterprise 2.0 software 'round here" - those guys never use the same words we do and that isn't about to change. A good I.T. person, though, knows how to interpret "user-speak" and present them with the tools they need even if they didn't know how to ask for them in our language. If anything, they're going to be more likely to say something like: "Sending out an email newsletter seems outdated - I wish there was a better way to communicate with our customers," or "I wish there was an easier way to keep up with the industry news," or "Wow, how many different versions of this documentation is saved on our intranet, anyway?" The old I.T. guy might mumble and turn their head, but the I.T. 2.0 guy knows to say "Blog! RSS! Wikis!" instead.

Still, it's not going to be as simple as just knowing the terminology. Now it's up to you to recommend the platform - will you be maximizing the investment you have in SharePoint, which already includes many Web 2.0 tools, or do you need a more customized solution? If so, whose? Those are the questions the new I.T. guy will need to answer - and yes, they will still need technical skills to do so, but there's a big difference between knowing those answers and knowing how to properly adjust the MTU size in Windows XP.

Cloud Services

I.T. 2.0 means computing moves to the cloud. Where today's businesses are running their servers in-house and behind the firewall, tomorrow's servers will be hosted by someone else. Microsoft, for example, will be offering hosted services for many of their server products from Exchange to BizTalk, SQL to SharePoint, and more. The Microsoft Online Services beta is underway and Bill Gates is talking about a future where millions of servers will live in their data centers.

And that's just one option. Google's coming after the business world, too. At first, it was just a simple offering of an easy-to-use but rapidly evolving web office suite that could be easily deployed with minimal expense, but then they added Google Apps for your domain, complete with admin dashboards and security settings, Google Sites for team collaboration, and Google Web Security for Enterprise. Clearly, they're well aware that there's a niche they can fill with a set of web tools that take advantage of this new always-on computing world.

Microsoft and Google are big names, but it's just scratching the surface of cloud computing. You also have Amazon's Web Services numerous SaaS offerings, and more. The I.T. 2.0 guy will need to know not just what software is best for the company, but whether or not it should run behind the firewall, in the cloud, or a combination of both.

The Mobile Workforce

The new workforce won't be tied down. With near-ubiquitous broadband and a growing employee roster of Gen Y workers, being mobile will be the norm, not the exception. The mobility that used to be reserved for only the well-traveled sales force, will now be available to almost everyone. Most office workers, except for the very bottom-rungs of time-clock punchers will be issued laptops, not desktops - the blessing and the curse of the mobile worker. Work-from-home won't be considered a perk, but a necessity.

The I.T. department, though, will have to adapt their current solutions to fit this new workforce - one that's not always connected to the company network, but surfing unprotected Wi-Fi from their local coffee shop or their own home wireless network. I.T. will need to find ways to push through the security updates and patches their users need, even if they're never remoting in to the company network. I.T. also needs to be more wary of lost and stolen company laptops filled with company data. Many companies are already turning to virtualization to solve this problem. Users will only have the illusion of a personalized desktop - their data will really live on servers instead. Welcome back to thin client computing.

A Self-Provisioning User Base

This new trend, dubbed "Tech Populism" by Forrester Research, is referring to the new user base of digitally savvy workers. As the boomers retire and Gen Y starts to fill in the ranks, I.T. will be dealing with a technologically-smart crowd of young workers who aren't afraid to find their own tools for the job. Intranet site too kludgy? They'll build their own on Google Sites, Microsoft Live Workspace, Basecamp, or any of a number of other similar team collaboration platforms available. File too big for email? They'll upload it to Box.net, Google Docs, Zoho, SkyDrive, or whatever other preferred file-sharing/storage service they're used to using. I.T. guys turning a blind eye to this practice will soon have their necks on the line when it's revealed that confidential data is in the cloud protected only behind the salesperson's password of "FIDO."

So, what's an I.T. guy to do? They can't lock down the whole internet, no matter how hard they try. Instead, I.T. is going to have to know the business - really know the business - and anticipate the needs the company's employees are going to have. Then, the challenge will be to research, locate, and deploy solutions that provide the ease-of-use the employees want, but also the security measures I.T. needs.

Conclusion

With all these changes, the new I.T. person will be very different than they are today. Those that have the skills of an engineer and the knowledge needed to run I.T. 2.0 are going to be superstars, but they also might be rare. Engineers used to the day-to-day technicalities of running a company network won't necessarily find themselves out of job - it's just that their workplace will change. They'll be moving out to the data centers where they'll work to keep the cloud up-and-running. Meanwhile, back at the office, the socially savvy, I.T. "facilitator" of Enterprise 2.0 will be running the show.

"I have to say I can’t agree with you Sarah, Google is clearly empowering operational level employees within an enterprise. In the event that their IT department hasn’t the funding (although given the fact that GApps is free this is a non starter anyway) or the time resource, operational and team level personnel can deploy the broader GoogleApps products to make the most of their collaboration potential. The way I see it, if IT departments were doing their jobs (and some are) there would be no need to be having this discussion. They would be sufficiently user-centric to decide on the best product for their users needs, be it MS, Google or anything else.

In all this discussion around circumventing, or not, corporate IT departments, people seem to have lost sight of the real issue here. Corporate IT’s role is to assess and implement solutions that provide the functionality to the users that those suers require. It isn’t to build empires or create silos. Any success Google has within an enterprise setting (and I’m not going to wade into the argument about whether or not Google apps is having enterprise level success) would seem to be to be a comment on the efficacy of the IT department itself.

For too long CIOs have been technology centric on the one hand and compliance driven on the other. Between cuddling up to the big software vendors and spending time worried about the skins with regards Sarbanes Oxley compliance, they’ve lost site of the fact that their existing offering to the business are lacking.

Rather than finding ways to block their users making individualised and decentralised decisions, they should be partnering with the business units to truly asses their requirements and the best solutions to fulfil their needs."

Google's Strategy in the Enterprise

While this approach may work in the enterprise space in the short term, in the long run, they're alienating the very people whose alliances they need in order to become a success. Today, with Google's announcement of Google Sites, the blogosphere is already comparing the product to Sharepoint and trying to drive nails into Microsoft's coffin. I'd argue that it's far too soon to claim that Google is offering anything that really has a shot at making a dent in the enterprise world.

As an online suite of applications, email, calendaring, IM, and even security and compliance with Postini's help, Google Apps is off to a good start as being a suite that really has it together. For the small to medium size business, you could say that Google makes a strong offering as a more affordable alternative to Microsoft Servers and applications. However, it's a big jump from offering tools to a mom-and-pop as compared with a global, Fortune 500 company.

Google is actually going about marketing to the enterprise market in a pretty ingenious way - they're not. Instead, they're bypassing the IT department (who would, in all honesty, probably laugh at the thought) and marketing their suite on the sly directly to the employees themselves: "Are the tools provided by your IT department too unwieldy to use? Is IT to slow to respond to your needs? Then forget IT and use Google Apps instead!" This is definitely a good plan for Google in the short term, but it's not one that is going to be good for them in the long run...especially when IT catches on to what their users are doing.

Take the new Google Sites, for instance. Ben Worthen's commented in today's Wall Street Journal about the product:

"Setting up sites like this has traditionally required help from the information-technology department. Google boasts in its press release that workers can set up a site 'without having to burden IT for support.' We love that phrase: It’s a bit like showing a teenager how to sneak out of the house and calling it a way to go out without burdening parents by letting them know. It also speaks volumes about Google’s strategy for breaking into businesses. The company is intentionally bypassing tech departments, which might object to Google hosting their business’s sensitive information. Instead, the company is appealing directly to the average worker, who doesn’t want to have to wait months for IT to have the time and money for their project. So while it will probably fill IT pros with visions of sensitive corporate data flowing out of their businesses, Google’s business model isn’t dependent on winning techies over."

A previous WSJ article also reported Dave Girouard, who runs Google’s enterprise unit, as saying this about what his company is doing: "We’re wrestling over who should have ultimate authority of the technology people use in the workplace. There’s no right or wrong answer so we have to respect everyone’s view."

Let's read between the lines of that last statement...Google doesn't think IT should have the ultimate authority about the tools people use to do their jobs. There's "power to the people," (tech populism) and then there's a total coup-d'etat. Google's opting for the latter.

Network World agrees: "By killing the admin function, Google is trying to change the culture of software usage - the power structure, if you will. Taken to extremes, such a structure means that no longer will IT be the law enforcement officers of policy."

CIO Fear #1: Functionality

A concern for Google Apps is the integration capabilities it offers. Alastair Mitchell, CEO at online collaboration and project management outfit Huddle.net doesn't feel Google is ready for business yet. "Google Sites may be badged as a business tool, but the fact is that it isn’t properly integrated with any of Google’s other apps. Worryingly, it seems that Google took a good product like JotSpot and stripped out most of powerful functionality. Now it’s just a pretty wiki," claims Mitchell.

A pretty wiki? OUCH! But Mitchell does have a point about integration. Microsoft's solutions are tightly integrated with each other, Google's, as of yet, are not.  Count Joe Graves, CIO of Stratus Technologies, a $200 million-per-year computer maker, among the doubters. Graves, a fan of both his company's Google Enterprise Search appliance and Salesforce.com thinks Google is a "just a sharp company," but he's standardized on Microsoft Office and plans to stay that way. "Google Apps would save us some money, but probably create some headaches that would surpass money savings," said Graves in an interview. "It's not clear with Google Apps that we'd have the same interoperability that we do with Microsoft Office. I took a look at Google Apps and wasn't really impressed with it. It doesn't seem like a comprehensive package."

CIO Fear #2: Security

Enterprise CIOs do have a justifiable reason to fear Google's encroachment on their territory...and it's not just about control. Although users may see IT as gatekeepers preventing them from being able to do their jobs, turning that control over to Google instead may not be a better solution.

An article in SearchCIO-Midmarket quotes Chenxi Wang, a principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc, as saying this about Google Apps "[Users] don't want to go through the IT department to get approval, because it's burdensome. On the flip side, the minus side is from a corporate standpoint, you have less control. I think this has its place for collaboration scenarios whereby the content that is being collaborated is not that sensitive or the organization is not a highly regulated industry, for example. Employees storing and sharing documents, spreadsheets and the like will be doing that on Google's servers, which could present a compliance problem in some industries. IM is included, which still makes some executives wary. And sensitive business information could be shared with the wrong people inside the business."

Wary indeed:

"It's not for us," said David Driggers, IT asset manager and deployment desktop systems team leader at Alabama Gas Corp. in Birmingham, Ala. Driggers said he worries about how Google's Web-based applications would square in terms of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. "Do you have real control over [email]?" he asked. "Where is the mail hosted? We have ours here and we control it."

Even Mark Harrison, of Abraham Harrison LLC, a test case for the Google Apps product has concerns. "It would be comforting to have an SLA that covered the entire suite," he says. (The Google Apps Premier Edition suite contains an availability guarantee only for its Gmail portion - 99.9 percent uptime -and offers no commitment for the other components.) In the year that he has used it, downtime has been rare. "We've never been crippled by an outage," Harrison says. Should one occur, the company would feel the impact, as they are now entirely dependent on the suite.

CIO Fear #3: The Google TOS

Another big fear is the scary Google TOS. Joshua Greenbaum writes on ZDNet about how Google defines content and what they say they do with it.

"First, let’s clarify what content is. Here’s the wording from the Google Terms of Service page: 'data files, written text, computer software, music, audio files or other sounds, photographs, videos or other images).'

Then, let’s clarify what Google says you have given it the right to do with your content, even though it generously lets you keep your copyright: (the typos are courtesy Google’s legal department, which forgot to use a word processor with a spell-checker.)

11.1 ….. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Did you catch that last line? The one about displaying your content in order to promote Google’s Services? Which of your business’s content would you want used in this way?

Then there’s the part about how Google can make your content available for syndicated services — i.e. spam and other forms of advertising. Again, what content do you think you’d like shared in this way?

11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

Don’t forget the cute little provision about termination of services, which goes like this:

4.3 …. As part of this continuing innovation, you acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you.

And here’s the clincher: Google can also nuke your data when it wants to, with no recourse to the user:

4.4 You acknowledge and agree that if Google disables access to your account, you may be prevented from accessing the Services, your account details or any files or other content which is contained in your account.

CIO Fear #4: True ROI

When you're looking at the enterprise marketplace, you can't really take the cost savings into the picture. The cost savings of moving to Google Docs just isn't as substantial as it is for a small company. Although the the $50/year price of Premier Edition is more affordable, enterprises with more than a few thousand employees are already buying Microsoft licensing in bulk for as little as $100 per license. Moving to Google Apps is a dramatic decrease in functionality for them, and one that isn't worth the cost.

Even with the addition of Google Sites, Google isn't offering Sharepoint-like functionality. For those that don't know, "Sharepoint" isn't just online collaboration and document sharing. It's a suite of products and technologies that offer functionality and access to all data across all applications, even line-of-business applications.

An IT admin commenter on ZDNet posts: "From within Outlook you can instantly pull up a customer, get a dozen looks on their activity or prior orders, find direct links to people closer to the products with email, phone or IM access immediately from tags in the documents and answer any question the customer has, period. Can you do that with Google apps? I don't believe so, but you can collaborate. big whoop. You can setup a network share and collaborate just as easily with what you already have and not investing in Google apps for that matter, if you want very limited functionality. MOSS blows Google apps away and does NOT cost more over the long run and provides much richer environment, many more tools to collaborate with, easily interface our BI data to all users with complete and great administrative controls, which Google lacks even for simply document sharing(wheee), a managed code runtime and services that allow your end users to all have an Office GUI, not just an office tool, to look at any data on the network, at any time, in any way they need to...I repeat, smart companies are looking beyond initial cost to cost and ROI over minimum 5 years. That is where Google starts to cost A LOT more..."

Google Shrugs Shoulders

So what?, they say.  We "give administrators the control to do that if that's what they decide," says Google Senior Product Marketing Manager Jeremy Milo said. "The easiest way to do it would be to disable all the applications."

He's referring to the administrative functions of the suite that allow CIOs to control which employees can use which applications in the suite. In order for a CIO or IT director to gain control of the suite, they must first sign up for Team Edition. Once inside, there is an administrative login that connects the CIO with Google. With that, the CIO is given an option to either create a CNAME record or upload an HTML file provided by Google to the company's domain. Both options prove that the CIO has control over the domain. A third option is to update the domain's MX record. Exercising any of those options essentially disables Team Edition for the domain and shifts everything to Google Apps Standard Edition, Google's free version of its Web-based application suite for businesses. Once that happens, companies can use Gmail as an email client and CIOs can take control of the applications. (source: SearchCIO-midmarket) 

So they only way to control employee access is to sign up for the program? If that wasn't such genius, I might actually call it...well, evil.

So Who's Using Google Apps in the Enterprise?

Google is proud to be offering their suite to "several" enterprise customers including GE, Procter & Gamble, Loreal, and Prudential. Touts Google Apps product manager Matt Glotzbach, the company has picked up 500,000 customers for Apps since it launched in February 2007 and is adding 20,000 users every day. We've passed 500,000 organizations using Google Apps, and we're adding 2,000 to 3,000 more a day," says Glotzbach. "The vast majority have been small- and medium-sized companies, plus educational institutions, but the pace and interest from big companies is picking up."

But even those figures barely register a dent in Microsoft's Office armor. Microsoft says they have more than 500 million Office users. Some 62% of U.S. businesses use Microsoft's Outlook e-mail software, compared with less than 1% for corporate webmail like Google's, says Tom Austin, an analyst at researcher Gartner.

And those big enterprises they have on board? Even on Google's very own Google Apps web site, the truth is told, if anyone can take a minute from doing the happy Google dance to notice. They currently list 12 companies using Google Apps, one of which is Google itself. Reading through the quotes I see this:

"GE is interested in evaluating Google Apps for the easy access it provides to a suite of web applications, and the way these applications can help people work together."

"L'Oreal R & D has decided to test Google Apps in order to optimize collaboration between its researchers."

"Interested," "evaluating," and "testing" are not words that equal an enterprise partnership.

Oh and Capgemini, the IT services and business consultancy, listed there? They deploy Google Apps to enterprises as one of their services. Their first deployment went successfully in November of 2007. It was to themselves.

The IT Backlash Is Yet To Come

Even though IT is warming up to more consumer-friendly applications, Google's methodology for getting into the enterprise has a good chance to completely backfire on them.

According to Google Apps senior product manager Rajen Sheth, "Google Apps has been, by definition, an IT project, and now we want to let people use it without IT involvement."  He goes on to suggest that there shouldn't be any concern about finding uplanned and unapproved implementations of Google Apps on corporate networks because " the IT department always has the option to sign up for the Standard Edition for free if they want to provide control over this. This is a solid, happy medium."

But Joel Hruska of Ars Technica writes on his personal blog:

"[there's] one problem with that: IT administrators tend to fervently dislike the sudden appearance of unapproved applications, even if said software package promises world peace, actually delivers all those free iPods, and periodically spits gold doubloons out of the CD-ROM drive. Google’s approach seems predicated on the old adage that it’s always easier to get forgiveness than permission. One the one hand, Google Apps Team Edition could help facilitate group-level communication on projects, but the program could also engender a significant backlash from IT managers who aren’t at all thrilled at its sudden appearance. This is particularly true of companies with strict(er) IT policies, or companies already in the middle of deploying an alternative work collaboration system.

Google claims that the purpose of Team Edition is to allow users to “share documents and calendars securely without burdening IT for support,” are more likely to be greeted by raised eyebrows from the IT department. In the right (or wrong) circumstances, the unapproved presence and use of Google Apps Team Edition could, in fact, increase the burden on IT support staff. Google seems to be betting that if it can build enough grassroots support for Google Apps, IT departments and corporations will have no choice but to embrace it as a provider. Such an approach may work beautifully in the consumer market, but there’s no guarantee corporations will be as flexible."

If anything, this strategy will drive enterprise IT even further from Google Apps, keeping the Apps program the sole province of the SOHO and small-medium business market.

Author Disclosure: I'm currently a writer for five different blogs, one of which is Microsoft property, Channel 10, but I am not a Microsoft employee. These remarks are solely my opinion alone, but it's likely they're influenced by my previous experience as a MCSE-certified systems administrator!

According to a new report by Forrester Research, Inc., Technology Populism is defined as "an adoption trend led by a technology-native workforce that self provisions collaborative tools, information sources, and human networks — requiring minimal or no ongoing support from a central IT organization."

For the layperson, this definition can be boiled down to this: more and more people are functioning as their own IT department at work.

History of IT Trends in Business

In the 1980's and 1990's, companies began bringing in minicomputers to replace the expensive and hard-to-maintain mainframe systems of the past, which in turn gave way to the rise of PC networks, LANs, and client/server based computing. The ease-of-use and cost of these new systems was a driving force powering the switchover that took place. Since the new web applications are also cheaper and easier than the current IT infrastructure in most traditional businesses, doesn't it make sense that the next movement in IT would be to transition to web-based computing?

Not so fast! Before everyone fully embraces the web app/cloud computing initiatives, there are some things to consider. Although the users are happy with their new tools they provided to themselves, how is this impacting the business?

Real vs Perceived IT Needs

A company's IT department generally provides a new user with computing equipment when they come onboard. More often than not, the equipment provided is a laptop computer and a web-enabled/email-enabled mobile phone device. The necessary tools and software programs the user needs to do their job are provided as well. Often, these include an Office suite of some sort, email, web access to email either via an VPN or secure web site, and remote access to their company's resources. Additional security programs like anti-virus and/or anti-spyware are provided as well, but it's unlikely the user will ever notice them, much less interact with them. In the background, IT stays busy making sure the computers and servers are protected and updated with the latest security patches, and the network itself remains uncompromised from outside intrusions.

However, today's employee is no longer satisfied with these basics. In their personal life, they've embraced the world of always on connectivity, access anywhere, social networking, collaboration, and cloud computing. More of today's companies are run by Gen Xers, and the growing population of Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000) in the professional workforce often dismisses conventional productivity tools — like email — in favor of text messaging, instant messaging, mobile devices, and social computing tools. These Millenials embody the Technology Populism movement — bringing the tools they use at home — like instant messaging, Facebook, Wikipedia,iPhones, BlackBerry devices, and even PlayStations — to work with them. For example, Adobe told Forrester that one of its European CIO customers required PlayStation support because the firm had a handful of Millennials who used PlayStations instead of PCs. (And somewhere, an IT manager is turning over in his grave.)

It might be that not only are the users more comfortable with the web apps they "grew up with," it's also possible that, despite their supposed tech-savviness, they don't actually know how to use traditional enterprise software. Could it be that what the users actually "need" is training? Could they be turning to lightweight applications because they don't truly grasp the complexities of or know how to use the software IT has provided? I would say that it's more than possible.

A Microsoft executive recently told Forrester that 90% of the feature requests he gets for Microsoft Office productivity tools are already in the products. Since many users don't even know the features of the software provided to them, they don't see it as a loss to turn to a scaled-down online version. If anything, they think they've gained features since web-enabled apps offer different types of features than their desktop-based cousins. So if businesses are going to continue to insist that the users only utilize the software applications IT supports, then the business has a responsibility to make sure the users know how to use them. (I know plenty of people with a MySpace profile decked out with the latest flash widgets, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a knowledge of how to perform calculations in an Excel worksheet!)

However, for some companies, the use of social computing technologies is fine, and their IT departments have even embraced their adoption in the enterprise. Forrester found that between a quarter and a third of employees at enterprises that have invested in social computing technologies — corporate podcasting, blogs, social networking, RSS, and wikis — are using those technologies for business purposes. Perhaps more significantly, decision makers at companies with no plans to make investments in web 2.0 technologies reported that, in the absence of a sanctioned corporate initiative, at least 3% of their colleagues are using them on their own. So, while web technologies are fine for some companies, it should not be up to the users to make that call - just because users want to use web technologies, doesn't mean they should.

Companies dealing with non-public customer data, for example, have to meet certain compliance guidelines to ensure that sensitive data isn't accessed anywhere outside of a secure connection. So what's to happen when a rogue employee throws a spreadsheet of private data into Google Docs because it's an easier way to share that large file with others than trying to compress it down to meet the size requirements of traditional email? Do you really trust Google enough to maintain the security of that file? What about the user whose Google password also happens to be "fido?" Their perception that the ease-of-use of Google Docs outweighed the security need to have their exchange of data processed over a secure connection and logged by their internal servers. Is this acceptable? Most IT managers would say, "heck NO!"

Tech Populism Concerns

Some IT managers have concerns about the introduction of more web technologies in the workplace. For example, what is to be done when a web app goes down? (It happens). Does business stop as well?

There is also a concern about what Forrester calls an "information silo." New tools like wikis and blogs could create "micro-silos" where locating the information or people you need becomes near impossible. Already, companies with in-house databases and extensive Sharepoint web sites are dealing with requests from staff looking for information, and the information they need is all in one place. I can't even begin to count the number of times I had to answer the question "where is that file on Sharepoint?" It's on Sharepoint! Argh! Now imagine that in addition to the company intranet, data is spread out across the web living on blogs, wikis, podcasts, videocasts, and social networks. How will you find it then? And will multiple versions of the same file reside out there as well?

And what about the burden on IT support? IT departments are trained to thoroughly understand, control, and support the hardware and software they provide to their staff. Adding more and more niche applications to their support workload isn't necessarily wise.

In speaking with an IT Network Manager in the finance industry, he explains, "the IT department in each company is already the most complex support environment in the history of business. We can easily have 100 different applications to support with just the basics of Windows, Office, and business applications. We need to maintain a minimal and consistent software installation, containing programs which are commonly used throughout the business world. We do not have the time or resources to train and hand-hold new users to our company because they want to use Firefox, Google Docs, or whatever the next 'Super Web 2.0 Ajax' program is. In other words, just because the perception of IT staff is that we have a 'Neo in the Matrix'-like understanding of technology, we can't possibly know and support every online application."

But Is IT Support a Necessary Component to the Equation?

The traditional provisioning model has business needs translated into a set of software categories and requirements that lead to lengthy evaluation processes, implementation, deployment, training, and — hopefully — use. IT plans for days, weeks, and even months in some cases to deploy the new technologies. And then there is the user training. An architecture firm’s IT director recently explained, "Our users would rather have teeth pulled than sit through software training; they just don’t show up."

Although traditional technologies like Exchange-based email and calendaring, Microsoft Office, industry-specific enterprise applications, or Sharepoint services for online collaboration and document sharing may require user training before mastery, a typical user can master a web app in minutes, without extensive training or with just a little help from colleagues and friends, not IT.

So What's an IT Manager to Do?

More than anything, IT Managers need to realize that the power of individuals to provision their own applications, information, and social networks is a trend that’s unlikely to stop. They can block sites on their firewall, but as users venture out on laptop computers beyond the company's walls, those sites become accessible again. Some employees who work mostly in house have taken to utilizing the company-provided aircard to circumvent the restrictions of the LAN. Then there are the web services themselves -they are aware that businesses are blocking them internally, so they're offering other ways to get access. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, for example, are all offering mobile versions of their web services.

For an IT manager to successfully balance the risks and rewards of technology populism, they must first embrace the trend to move forward, then they must address their particular company's exposure levels. They need to determine who is using social tools and why. It may be that they need to focus on simplicity, usability, training, or speed of their current set of applications, and perhaps even address the needs of some individuals or groups to fill in the gaps that the online tools are addressing. Is the Marketing Department using an online wiki? Then perhaps it's time to train them on how to use Sharepoint Services' wikis instead.

The IT manager needs to stay current with what's happening in the business IT world, yes, but also in the consumer web application space as well. Company policies need to be written up to address the use of social tools and guidelines need to be put in place about the sources of trusted information.

It may also be time for IT Managers to give some web apps a try. Web apps like Spiceworks offer an in-house installation of a web-based inventory analysis program, and could be a good alternative to the static, manual databases used in the past. IT Managers will need to determined which tools they sanction and which tools need to be avoided, while ultimately keeping not just their department's needs in mind, but the needs of the business as a whole.

In the end, it's the IT Manager who will determine where the company stands in regard to Technology Populism, and that may be one of the more critical decisions a business will make in the coming days and months as Tech Populism becomes the new reality.