By Sam Huleatt, CEO
I have been following the progress of FASTforward 2008 with great interest. Our new project - Workstreamr - is to be a new entrant in what most now refer to as the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ space. Very talented folks such as Andrew McAfee of Harvard University have spent vast amounts of time researching, debating and ultimately defining this industry.
Now I must humbly disagree with their vernacular.
For many younger people (and I assume older ones too!) enterprise software is a big ugly word. For myself and my fellow millenials, enterprise software provokes nightmares of installation CDs, dedicated servers, bloated Microsoft products with thousands of buttons — heavy applications littered with acronyms and hardcopy manuals. Enterprise 2.0 is not about making the old new, it’s about making new, new. We should be talking about “fill-in-the-blank 1.0″ not “enterprise 2.0″ because there is a fundamental change taking place in how we do work and software should represent that (more on this later).
Personally I see majority of current “enterprise 2.0” offerings as attempts breathe life into versions of yesterday’s software and systems. This is a problem. Old solutions are designed for old work environments and old office cultures. The notion of work understood by my generation is has changed and is still changing. Overall work culture has substantially shifted in only the last 20, even 10 years. However, addressing change from an IT perspective is difficult. Most major U.S. corporations are entrenched in products they have spent small fortunes maintaining over the years; system built by such iconic names as IBM and Microsoft.
For many CTO’s, instituting a ‘radical new offering’ such as a SaaS-based product is viewed as more of threat to the office than as an opportunity. However, many of these same CTO’s see also the long-terms benefits of web 2.0, social media and SaaS. CTO’s understand that they must - at a minimum – experiment or ‘dabble’ in such functionality. However, for the majority of dabbles, they turn to new offerings or extensions from the old guard brands. As a result, IBM and Microsoft continue to add new “2.0” offerings to their existing platforms. Unfortunately, they are simply ‘adapting old software’ and not innovating something new; a change agent.
A metaphor I have used recently is that Workstreamr is like the Barack Obama of its domain. While the products from ‘establishment companies’ may be functional and competent for the moment, progress does not come from living in the past. Both end-users and CTO’s need to look beyond past successes and recognize that staples such as exchange servers and Outlook are soon to be old news.
Workstreamr represents a departure from old notions of enterprise architecture. But it is also more than that. Workstreamr represents a shift in how we collectively accomplish work. The model of the traditional 9-5 office is rapidly changing.
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