907RA Enterprise 2.0 Takeaway: Social IT Changes Core Business IT Development
Authors: Bruce Guptill and Alex Bakker
The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this week included and examined a wide range of emergent and disruptive IT types, with a baseline message that “we ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Session after session noted and emphasized that while the applications are legion, the devices are powerful, and the deployments can be exciting and productive, much of what we see in the marketplace today is still experimental. Enterprise IT leaders and technology / service providers alike emphasized the dynamic and changing nature of Cloud-enabled social, mobile, and collaborative IT, and the management challenges that they incur severally and in combination.
What Saugatuck found most interesting was the de facto acceptance among business and IT leaders of the view that the IT that supports and enables business should no longer be focused solely on business transactions. Instead, IT should enable and support business interactions. Terms and trends such as “social business”, which Saugatuck began using in 2009, encapsulate this (604MKT, Value from Social Business Information Requires Social Business Analytics, 29May2009).
This is not a new point of view by any means; Saugatuck saw this as an eventuality of what was originally labeled “Web 2.0” (421MKT, Web 2.0 in 2008: First the Blueprint, then the Foundation, 31Dec2007). But the trend is so strong today that Saugatuck sees the concept of social business, driven by widespread adoption and use of relatively inexpensive, Cloud-enabled social, mobile, and collaborative IT as dominating IT development and investment. Through at least 2015, the majority of new IT developed, brought to market, and deployed within and between enterprises will be social business-focused.