Web Apps Strike Corporate IT Like Cloud-to-Ground Lightning

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.

Comments

[engtech]

Very true.

I use Remember the Milk task tracker for all my work/personal task tracking. I don't put any work sensitive info there (really, just a fragmented sentence per task) but that isn't on our corporate intranet.

[Dan Schawbel]

Choice is essential because different people consumer information in different ways.

[Patrick De Schutter]

Excellent point, but I would argue that enterprise software is getting up to speed with Web 2.0 quicker than you might think. For what it's worth (hope I'm not being too obvious in plugging here ;) ), we at ContactOffice want to cater to professionals wanting to conduct business online without many of the security / privacy / portability issues that Google Apps and the likes face. That makes us kinda the 'in between' solution. Click my name to learn more.

[Josh Bernoff]

Interesting just how parallel this is to last huge IT explosion -- people who brought personal computers into the enterprise and drove the "MIS department" nuts with their home-grown spreadsheets in the 1970s.

[Jose del Moral]

It's a very silent revolution, but it is so mucho more usable that what we had before!

[Benjamin Koe]

What is also interesting is not only traditional office applications are being used online, but new apps such as personal databases, wikis, social networks, blogs, etc.

And not just from a compliance point of view with SOX, but security as well. Now everything lies outside the network's parameter.

[fasdf]

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[marcelo]

Es muy cierto!
http://www.spymac.com/details/?2273042

[Simone]

I use Remember the Milk as my to do list and Google Calendar, I'm pretty sure I'm way out of corporate policy! (I work in the marketing dept of a top 5 FMCG company)
Still that's weird. Companies could same an enormous amount of money by embracing at least some of the web services out there...