Why aren’t corporate CIO’s flocking to blogs, wikis and other social tools as fast as you’d think? Nearly two thirds of CIO’s in a recent survey responded that they have no plans to introduce “blogs” or “wikis”. And (cough) “virtual worlds” scored even lower. ITWorld Canada interviewed me the other day on this subject. Here’s an excerpt of what I had to say:
But according to tech blogger and Firestoker co-founder Thomas Purves, the problem might be finding the right tools to use. Virility doesn’t work in the enterprise space as easily as it does on the open Web, said Purves. “If you have firewalls in the way, what one business is using internally, the business right next door to them has no idea…what’s going on there or what value they might be getting out of it. So it’s really hard for ideas, when they do work, to spread,†he said. “I think also some of the best tools are coming out of companies who aren’t the established IT providers…smaller startups who don’t have the distribution and the marketing reach necessary to get their story out there.â€
Another obstacle may be the tools themselves, added Purves. “It’s been really slow for businesses to discover some of the values of social technology, but at the same time, a lot of social technology providers have had a tough time marketing to business or even necessarily adopting their products ideally for business as opposed to a consumer environment.â€
“On the consumer side, blogs have definitely been here for a while and have been used a lot, but on the business side, not a lot of companies are doing it. I see a lot more companies using blogs internally, for maybe their collaboration tools or for their projects, but not necessarily externally communicating to their customers or their clients,†said Abramovitch.
“Blogs and wikis were version 1.0 of Web 2.0,†said Purves. “They were like direct, ‘Let’s take a few tools that have worked for Wikipedia with the blogosphere and let’s just bring them straight into the enterprise.’ I think you have to do a little bit more work than that to make tools that really work in a business environment.â€
…According to Purves, online collaboration tools should be a top consideration. “Tools that empower employees and let the leadership emerge within organizations is going to be important. 
“Inevitably, in organizations, you’re working on a project that someone was working on three years ago and you just had no idea. There’s so much reinventing the wheel and so many resources are trapped within people’s heads. Unless you have some of these social tools to expose knowledge that’s out there and get it exchanged, you don’t necessarily have those rich interactions,†said Purves.
More and the full article here: Canadian CIOs shun blogs, wikis and virtual worlds
There is whole other subtext going on here too that I should get around to doing a separate post about “Why asking CIOs about Enterprise 2.0 can be like asking dinosaurs about meteorites”.
