Quietly, in cubicles around the world, a perfect technology storm is brewing. This tempest may prove more disruptive to business than any other tech surge we've seen to date, including instant messaging, web-based email, corporate blogging or social networking. There's a great battle brewing over technology choice vs. control.
The web has arguably established itself as the decade's dominant development platform. This shift is rapidly spawning the roll-out of innovative applications that equip information workers with newfound capabilities for managing work, either solo or in collaboration with others.
Rich online apps such as Highrise, Google Docs, Zoho, Spinvox, Yahoo Mail, Picnik and countless others that operate "in the cloud" are quietly making bootstrappers more productive, all without the help of corporate IT. Further, this revolution is dawning just as millions of free spirited Gen Yers enter the workforce. Unlike their Baby Boomer parents, this generation is even more tech savvy and will do anything to control the flow of work as it tries to seep into every crevasse of their personal lives. They simply won't allow that.
However, all of this directly conflicts directly with today's corporate IT agenda. Understandably for a myriad of legal, ethical, reliability and security reasons, they work hard to to ensure that business information stays on internal servers. They license a host of enterprise applications - many of them are web-based.
Unfortunately for corporate IT, however, they will find that they can't move as fast as Web 2.0 does. Talent isn't the issue here. IT inertia, long-term vendor agreements, the law and Sarbanes Oxley are all weights that can shackle corporations. All the while, a more free spirited workforce is using what's freely available to them because it fills a void. With this, information is flowing into data caverns that only the employee - and really no one else - controls.
The silent adoption web applications in the enterprise will strike directly at the heart of corporations like cloud to ground lightning. IT managers who can surf into the storm waves will gain considerable competitive advantage. The key is to embrace change - or, as one Googler suggest, to give employees choice over control. (This arguably gives small and mid-sized companies a considerable advantage.) Those that crack down on choice, however, may find themselves struggling to keep up with the competition as their workforce becomes more productive, efficient and happy.
