David Cappuccio

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David J. Cappuccio
Research VP
6 years at Gartner
41 years IT industry

David J. Cappuccio is a managing vice president and chief of research for the Infrastructure teams with Gartner, responsible for research in data center futures, servers, power/cooling, green IT, enterprise management and IT operations. Read Full Bio

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Comments – The Elephant in the Social Software Room

by Dave Cappuccio  |  February 15, 2009  |  1 Comment

Perhaps I’m being a bit cynical here, but after reading the well written blog post The Elephant in the Social Software Room from Craig Roth of Burton I decided to re-read it, substituting the arguments around social software with the arguments about allowing the use of Instant Messaging in corporations from 8 years ago, or even eMail from 30 years ago.  Take the first paragraph and apply any of these technologies to the argument….

“…, organizations often fret about potential negative impacts of breaking down organizational and, to some extent, social barriers.  Some stakeholders wonder whether execs really want borderless discussions among their staffs, whether engineers really want sales people to be able to contact them directly, whether employees will spread poor practices without gatekeepers, etc….”

It seems that the issues and potential organizational impacts, and therefore the decisions IT execs need to focus on, haven’t really changed that much over the years, all that’s changed is the specific application.  The real impact is that all future hires will have social networking built into their personal interactions, and assume that it’s a standard way of doing business.  This is basic consumerization doing what it always does – forcing IT to adapt to technologies they aren’t ready for.  The challenge for IT is to put a strategy in place to adopt social software and integrate it into their business process, and to do it proactively, rather than in reaction to business demands.

IMHO

1 Comment »

Category: Consumerization Social Software     Tags:

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Swan   September 9, 2009 at 9:53 pm

    Or, over time the applications become so easy to use (like Facebook and Twitter) that employees start incorporating them into their work activity in order to better do their jobs, going AROUND IT in the process.

    Regulating access to tools that people want to use is like trying to enforce laws regarding music/software piracy. Good luck. :)

    The group in between the end employee and IT is the business unit. More power will rest with them to help their people achieve IT business value. IT will become more and more the plumbers providing security, network, and the glue required to plug the hosted apps together.