Fusion ECM

Stephen O'Grady has an interesting post on his blog talking about analysts and their audience. A secondary point in his discussion, though, refers to the balance of power changing in the Enterprise. Another blog that he links too - from Billy Marshall at SandHill.com reinforces the point that increasingly the CIO is always the last to know when new applications and technology are deployed.

In both cases the point is that people are used to sharing and communicating in their non-work lives and they will do it at work if it helps them get things done - or just connect to their colleagues. If you don't give people IM clients, they will use their personal ones (and then you'll have zero control over it). Speaking from experience, I can tell you that if you try to block those chat ports, your users will find the Yahoo (or similar) web interface for chat. You can try and block those URLs, and then perhaps the conversation will shift to text messages on the phone.

I think what we are starting to see now is the movement away from the attitude that corporate IT will try to block access to collaborative tools, towards the attitude that it makes sense to provide those tools. And the enterprise needs to move fast or people will find their own solutions. There's a certain large software company that has a less-than-perfect collaborative environment; so technically-savvy teams were using google calendar and google docs to share information. How would you like to be part of that legal discovery or records retention process?

I'm pretty sure most people understand that their work life / persona is subject to different constraints than ther personal life (for instance I don't talk politics on this blog) and most people are OK with the fact that their corporate communications "tool kit" may not be as full-featured as their personal one. But if the basics aren't there, you can bet they will fall back on their personal favorites and then we have to try and reel in those practices and collect that info after the fact.

Here's a metaphor to close - when BAA reconfigured Terminal 1 and 2 at Heathrow airport a couple of years ago they decided they wanted to discourage people from picking up passengers at the curbside (rather than paying to park and meeting people inside). So they just got rid of the passenger pick up area. Do you think that solved the problem?

update 9/12/08 - fixed the very first word of the post - ooops