Last week, in a staff meeting of my research institute, a discussion on the use of Web 2.0 technology came up. Reflecting on the discussions, I realized that actually the typical IT infrastructure we find in companies today has fallen years behind what we use in everyday life.
Today’s practices in companies
In enterprises a huge part of the work is to share information and thoughts, and to store and share documents. But what are the practices today?
- To share information with the collages there are two ways: either writing a mail to the “everyone” list (don’t you dare!) or submitting it for the newsletter (how many people may actually take the time to read all of it?).
- To share documents the most common practice in all projects I have witnessed so far is attaching them to a mail. This is a lot of fun, in particular if you have a tight quota and need to clear the inbox regularly. Within the company, documents can be stored and shared by putting them onto a server that is accessed as a network drive. To be able to find documents later an elaborate set of rules and directory templates has been created, which – in theory – tell you where to store your document.
Today’s practices on the internet
But if we take a look at the tools we use every day on the internet I wonder if we are not wasting a huge potential here
- Google allows me to search the biggest pile of data mankind has ever created (Internet!) in the blink of an eye. But I cannot index my institute’s document server with Google Desktop, because the search index will be stored on Google server
- Twitter and Facebook allow me to easily share information with others. But I cannot just use Facebook or Twitter to post a rant about something stupid in my company, because it may negatively affect the employer’s image
- Dropbox helps me accessing documents from different computers and sharing them with others. I cannot just store a document in a shared Dropbox folder to provide my team with instant read/write access to it, since it may involve storing sensitive material on an external server
So, what tools are out there that can replace Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Dropbox but at the same time respect the companies’ need for privacy and security? How would it affect work if such tools were in place in the intranet already?
