(taken from cnn.com)
“Why can’t I have this at home?” Employees in the office used to ponder this question about corporate technology not easily available to consumers. Today, the question has been inverted. Simple technologies such as Skype, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are being desired on the job: “Why can’t I do this at work?”
Corporate information technology departments meanwhile often seem oblivious to their potential usefulness, even as workers wonder at their absence. But increasingly such technologies are being used for business. This is partly because enterprise versions have emerged with fancier security features. And partly it’s because as the consumer-side versions keep growing, new users continue to come from within small companies — or even large enterprises, often to the horror of security-conscious IT departments.
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, has seen the emergence of small copycat services focused on businesses. Yammer, for instance, claims to have better security than the free Twitter, and it charges a small per-head fee. Users, rather than answering the Twitter question of “What are you doing?” for anyone to read, answer “What are you working on?” for colleagues only to read.
Wikis, online pages that any user can edit, surged in popularity among consumers thanks partly to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Not long after businesses hopped aboard with tools geared for them. One of those, PBwiki, has seen the number of individual business wikis created with it jump to well over 40,000, up from less than 20,000 a year ago and only about 5,000 two years ago.
On the social networking side, Facebook and MySpace became household names seemingly overnight. This year businesses are expected to spend more than $250 million on social networking tools geared towards them, from vendors like Awareness, Communispace, and Jive Software, according to research firm Forrester. Vendors are increasingly offering companies suites of Web 2.0 technologies that have emerged on the consumer side. Skype, the online phone service bought by eBay, noticed that many of its customers were small businesses. To entice more of them, it created a business version of its software with improved security and a “control panel” application for central management of Skype credit and numbers.
Last month Google even launched a YouTube-like video sharing service for businesses. The idea is that employees can share videos amongst themselves in a secure setting. A CEO could broadcast a message, for instance, or a technician could post a how-to video.
Research firms foresee consumer adoption driving more technologies into enterprises over the coming years. Among them are desktop video-conferencing, virtual worlds, 3-D controllers, and augmented reality. Many research analysts believe that corporations departments should make it their ongoing strategy to take advantage of such consumer technologies, rather than bump into them on a case-by-case basis. Besides, there’s a nice upside to this approach for IT workers, as long as security and other challenges can be overcome.
I found this article particularly interesting because for Project #2, my group and I are analyzing the effects of procrastination on students as well as on individuals in the work force. This new idea of implementing simple consumer technologies into information technology corporate departments seems like a recipe for disaster: hours on end spent procrastinating leading to the downfall of one corporation after another. Or are we too pessimistic? Could this innovation actually be more advantageous? What pros and cons do you see beside the obvious temptation to procrastinate?
1 Comment
November 24, 2008 at 1:21 am
I don’t think we have to worry about companies giving employees more options to procrastinate. Employers will obviously have the option to fire a worker that spends all of their time with social networking applications, and this should be enough incentive not to. I took an internship last year and the engineering firm had an instant messaging client on all of their computers. When employees needed something simple, or digital, they would use this in order to get it without having to quit what they were doing. Sometimes, but not very often, it was used simply for social interaction or a quick joke, but this was a small office where that was normal outside of the instant messaging anyway.