Geoffrey Moore widely known
for his ground breaking and transformative analysis of technology
adoption life cycle (Crossing the Chasm) provides an incisive
analysis of the impact of web 2.0 technologies on Enterprise IT. In his White
Paper “Systems of Engagement and The Future of Enterprise IT” he
advances the notion that that “Over the past decade, there has been a
fundamental change in the axis of IT innovation. In prior decades, new systems
were introduced at the very high end of the economic spectrum. Now it is
consumers, students and children who are leading the way, with early adopting
adults and nimble small to medium size businesses following, and it is the
larger institutions who are, frankly, the laggards.” He then makes a compelling
case that “What is transpiring is momentous, nothing less than the planet
wiring itself a new nervous system. If your organization is not linked into
this nervous system, you will be hard pressed to participate in the planet’s
future.”
Of particular
value to IT professionals focusing on Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is
Geoffrey Moore’s analysis of the interrelationships between what he refers to
as systems of engagement (aka social
media) and systems of record. Social
media wants to be free, perhaps only subject to principle-based controls, while
systems of record by their very nature need to be subject to controlled
processes. Social media is designed to facilitate collaborative knowledge
creation processes, while systems of record are designed to transform that
inchoate, subjective knowledge into re-usable best practices in the form of
explicit knowledge. Such explicit knowledge is deemed a corporate asset with
inherent business and informational value which must be preserved and protected
as a record. Striking a balance between the transient and permanent nature of
systems of engagement and systems of record is expected to create significant
challenges for IT organizations.
Geoffrey
Moore’s observation is that “Best practices in this new world are scarce, the
pressure by the business to implement is accelerating, a generation of
networked millenials is ready to enter the workforce, and connections back to
the familiar world of systems of record are tenuous. Our traditional
definitions of control and governance must adapt to meet the changes of this
new world.” He provides highly practical and empirically validated
recommendations on how to effectively integrate systems of engagement into
systems of record. He concludes that “The challenge now is that organizations
must redefine how they deal with these issues and extend how they think about
control and governance in order to deal with social technologies that are much
more distributed, informal, and ubiquitous than anything that we have known
previously.”
Hope you will
find the White Paper informative and helpful.
