Consumer to Business Web (2.0 of course)
October 17th, 2008
Gordon Haff crafted an interesting post this month on the Identity 2.0 conundrum, in which he notes that there is an increasing blurring of the line between personal and professional identities on the web. I keep this “corporate” blog on Ingres, but include personal blog posts regarding music news and concerts since I am an avid music aficionado, with the intention that this mixes it up a bit by providing business and entertainment opinions. Regarding other identities, I keep all professional contacts in LinkedIn. I had intended to keep Facebook as my personal network, but find that colleagues ‘friend’ me such that I can’t consider all contacts there to be strictly personal any longer.
The topic reminded me of some consideration I have been giving as to how to weave social networking sites more into the fabric of the company. Part of what the IT team provisions to the company relate to communication and collaboration capabilities. So we run out and build a company directory, an email/calendaring solution, a doc mgt solution, an intranet solution, instant messaging and other infrastructure. Often though, people already have many of these things and pick their own way to communicate, and collaborate.
I can envision a future where the two come together - we all use our own directory, cell phones, personal email, messaging, and collaboration tools, all in the cloud, and outside the company’s firewall, but we have a channel of sorts across these solutions that is secured for the company. If an employee changes companies, the channel is shut down, but the personal side of those solutions remains. Maybe I am dreaming on a Friday afternoon here, but it seems attainable, and a natural evolution of offerings by companies like Google who cross over from consumer to business. In the meantime, we do continue to evaulate and adopt externally based solutions across this spectrum, which at least bring some of the benefits of the consumer web into the corporate fold.
October 18th, 2008 at 12:54 am
[...] Consumer to Business Web (2.0 of course) [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
As I said in my piece, I don’t have a big issue with the blending because anything I want to write about in public is pretty innocuous and AFAIK anyone I work for/with isn’t going to take major umbrage with mild personal details intruding into the professional. But I can easily imagine lots of situations where the personal is less mainstream (or at least less sedate) and professional contacts less tolerant.
October 20th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Has a conversation at lunch with a salesperson basically asking “how much can IT spy on me” after a conversation about the use of IM… the question could be “how much does IT care to spy”… call me gen Y but I like the blurring of the lines and the great constellation of tools that I can use… spyed on by IT or not…
November 9th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
[...] makes me feel like more of a whole person, to blend both aspects.” She also pointed me to Doug’s blog on this topic. View from the Matterhorn conference room, Redwood City [...]