Well, that's not exactly what the article, by J. Nicholas Hoover, says. It doesn't say that Enterprise 2.0 "must dominate."
In fact, the article cites the reservations about Enterprise 2.0 of a majority of surveyed IT professionals - mostly in respect of security, integration and somewhat undefined (quantitatively) ROI. Ross Mayfield turns Hoover's lemons into lemonade, in his response to the article, yet there is no doubt that Hoover means rather to be cautionary than laudatory.
They are not wrong, by the way, the IT professionals. It's their job to question change on these grounds. In fact, IT professionals (and the MIS department before IT, and the Data Processing department before MIS) have objected to pretty much every step along the road to global information democracy on the grounds of security, and they have questioned the ROI of every technology along that road too.
I think most of my readers - most people in the industry for that matter - have not been around as long as I have. Most of you don't remember personal computers being questioned and resisted on these same grounds. Many of you don't remember that Internet email, when it became obvious it would swamp private email systems from vendors like Lotus, was thought to pose the same threats to security.
They weren't wrong to object, either. Every opportunity also poses some kind of a threat. But, the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 - of every technology that adds to people's ability to act on, communicate, create, massage, etc. information - are so great that in every case so far they have far outweighed the dangers. Does anyone doubt that the same pattern will prevail in this case?
We are on a long road, never unbending but not ending either, to the point when all information will be in the hands of any person who can create and use it and will pass without barriers from one set of hands to another. At that point, the information store, if you will, of an enterprise will be the emergent result (a set of emergent views, more precisely) of what individuals know and share.
When movable type made possible the explosion of printed material by anyone who wanted to author it, one of the great liberal professions of history passed out of existence in less than a century - I refer to the profession of scribe. Perhaps the taxonomists will pass from our midst into the same mist? The database designers? What do you think?
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In fact, the article cites the reservations about Enterprise 2.0 of a majority of surveyed IT professionals - mostly in respect of security, integration and somewhat undefined (quantitatively) ROI. Ross Mayfield turns Hoover's lemons into lemonade, in his response to the article, yet there is no doubt that Hoover means rather to be cautionary than laudatory.
They are not wrong, by the way, the IT professionals. It's their job to question change on these grounds. In fact, IT professionals (and the MIS department before IT, and the Data Processing department before MIS) have objected to pretty much every step along the road to global information democracy on the grounds of security, and they have questioned the ROI of every technology along that road too.
I think most of my readers - most people in the industry for that matter - have not been around as long as I have. Most of you don't remember personal computers being questioned and resisted on these same grounds. Many of you don't remember that Internet email, when it became obvious it would swamp private email systems from vendors like Lotus, was thought to pose the same threats to security.
They weren't wrong to object, either. Every opportunity also poses some kind of a threat. But, the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 - of every technology that adds to people's ability to act on, communicate, create, massage, etc. information - are so great that in every case so far they have far outweighed the dangers. Does anyone doubt that the same pattern will prevail in this case?
We are on a long road, never unbending but not ending either, to the point when all information will be in the hands of any person who can create and use it and will pass without barriers from one set of hands to another. At that point, the information store, if you will, of an enterprise will be the emergent result (a set of emergent views, more precisely) of what individuals know and share.
When movable type made possible the explosion of printed material by anyone who wanted to author it, one of the great liberal professions of history passed out of existence in less than a century - I refer to the profession of scribe. Perhaps the taxonomists will pass from our midst into the same mist? The database designers? What do you think?
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