Tom Austin

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Tom Austin
VP & Gartner Fellow
17 years at Gartner
41 years IT industry

Tom Austin, vice president, has been a Gartner fellow for a decade. He is chief of research for social software, collaboration, communications, information management, business intelligence and high-performance workplace (HPW) research. Read Full Bio

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Hidden Messages in the Google Zeitgeist – The Ultimate Risks of Consumerization

by Tom Austin  |  December 10, 2008  |  3 Comments

People now dominate the Google Zeitgeist

Check out Google’s 2008 Zeitgeist site. And browse through the various tabs on that page (e.g., US Zeitgeist and Trendsetters). 

What’s remarkably clear is the total absence of Information Technology related terms or issues. Not that information technology isn’t important. Without information technology, we wouldn’t have the Internet or Google.

But IT is becoming subsumed by the larger social and economic activities that now have come to depend on it being there – like the oxygen we breathe.

And, as it becomes subsumed, it becomes transparent – faceless, hidden, taken for granted (not by all but by most) and immensely important.

As the technology disappears from view (not fast enough for many people) and people come to rely on it (and their own choices of what to use), what deep risks do we – IT professional, the IT analyst and the IT practitioner — run?

3 Comments »

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3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Eric P   December 10, 2008 at 10:20 am

    Does your analogy imply that IT will become like roads and bridges in the U.S.? Everybody uses them, but nobody wants to invest in them unless there’s a major collapse.

  • 2 Wes Rishel   December 10, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    Clearly the general public doesn’t wonder much about IT.

    To what extend does the lack of interest in IT represent any kind of a trend?

    http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/archive2001.html

    Here are the GZ entries from 2001. In January, arguably HotMail is one IT-related topic out of 20. Looking at several other months for 2001 the numbers are more like zero out of ten, unless you include iPOD or ring tones.

    In general, I might have expected some trend away from technology inquiries based on the theory that the technorati were earlier adopters of Google. But you would have to look back further in time or farther out on the long tail to find support for the theory.

  • 3 Jeffrey Mann   December 10, 2008 at 7:14 pm

    At a Cisco conference this week, I heard IT and networking described as the “fourth utiity” after gas, electricity and water. That puts it in perspective.