Where has the action been in technology over the past decade?
I can tell you one thing for certain. It has been in a very different place than it was during the early stages of my professional career.
For most of my career, the action has been in PC-centric applications and solutions that were delivered by the IT gods and goddesses at the organizations for which I worked. I have been lucky to work for some pretty flexible organizations, but most of time I was a pretty good corporate citizen even without mandates or restrictions. It was rare that I would covet some piece of software or hardware from home and wish I could get it at work. Enterprise IT was a pretty cool place.
It doesn't require a rocket scientist to know that all that has sure changed.
Consumer IT and network delivered applications are where all the fun has been for the past decade. We constantly besiege our IT staffs with "Why can't we?" questions. The power has shifted to the business side of the house, whose impatience with long and cumbersome implementation cycles grows daily.
In this environment, we constantly struggle with what I call the "80% problem." As a person in charge of the business of AIIM, a solution that delivers 80% of what I want and is delivered right NOW is WAY better than one that might be 100% of what I need, but is #23 on an ever growing set of IT "priorities."
In this process, I am even willing to give up on some integration desires in return for speed. I realize this is likely not likely in our long-term interests, but don't care.
Here's an example. Even though we are a small organization, email has ceased to be the place where we keep track of what is going on in the business. Email is the place where you go when you want someone to approve something. Everything else that comes on email is noise. As a result, email fails miserably in providing to an organization the kind of awareness that we all get routinely about our social connections through Facebook.
The solution? My IT people say wait and a lot of Facebook-like functionality will be present in SharePoint. We (business types) found a product called Yammer that delivers Facebook-like social functionality to private networks. And we implemented it in a few hours, including implementation on a variety of mobile devices. For free.
That kind of responsiveness and ease of implementation is the expectation the business increasingly will take into its dealings with IT and into its expectations of content solutions. The enterprise needs to find ways to catch up or the people with the business problem will find a way around them.
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