This is a hot topic in large companies today and it’s not just about what people are saying about you on public websites. It’s also about what your employees are doing. IT departments today face a challenge as employees adopt blogs, wikis, and tools like QuickBase (I work on the QuickBase product). This can cause a major disruption to the status quo as employees go way beyond the IT sanctioned tools for getting their jobs done.

As with any disruption there is also opportunity. IT managers with strong leadership skills can take advantage of what’s happening to help improve employee productivity while maintaining good security over the company’s intellectual property. Here is a story we hear repeated over and over again regarding QuickBase.

An employee brings in QuickBase to solve a problem. Let’s say it’s managing and coordinating a supply chain of 20 different vendors. There was no IT solution for this problem and IT was not staffed to implement something. The employee didn’t bother to tell IT what they were doing. Fast forward three months and now QuickBase has expanded and is used for Project Management, meeting agendas and action items, and candidate tracking. It’s up to 50 users. Now IT notices. Here’s the IT conversation:

IT is concerned about storing confidential company info on Intuit’s QuickBase website but then they realize that prior to this employees were emailing spreadsheets to partners with a lot more company info and completely unencrypted. Second, the IT person realizes that they use TurboTax and that they are storing their tax data with Intuit. Lastly, they realize that with QuickBase they can watch all the traffic and usage that was a black box before.

The big insights that come out of this for IT are:
- Transparency breeds accountability. When employees are collaborating online they will self-police and do the right thing. If they don’t, they are accountable to all the other people who are online with them.
- By embracing QuickBase IT can push many of the business requests for systems back to the business and play more of a coach and enabler role, thus allowing them to focus on strategic projects for the company.
- Web 2.0 is here and they can either let it happen to them or take control and lead the charge.

The pace of innovation in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies is incredibly exciting and offers huge opportunity for the people that can see how to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, it also can cause fear for those who are committed to the existing way of doing things… leading to the knee-jerk reaction Matthew mentioned.