TheWayoftheWeb

In an example of timely thinking, Accenture has released a report which tallies with my recent revisit to how the IT departments of most companies need to radically change to meet the needs of a very different and constantly changing environment. My original post ‘IT could lead the revolution‘ and ‘Still waiting for the IT revolution‘ both talked about how users, particularly in a creative environment, need to find ways to implement new technology quickly and efficiently - often in the face of restrictive IT policies.

And then ReadWriteWeb covered the Accenture report  with ‘Millennials Will Route Around IT Departments‘.

Some key points:

• More than a third of Millennials also indicated that they were dissatisfied with the technologies their employers currently provide.
• Over a quarter of the employees surveyed by Accenture to use technology that is unsupported and unsanctioned by their corporate IT departments.
• Almost half of all Millennials who use social networks, blogs, vlogs, or Twitter do so without support from their IT departments (and often against the IT policies of their companies).
• A quarter of those who use online collaboration tools and open-source software also do so without support.
• 60% of the employees surveyed by Accenture argue that they are unaware of their companies’ IT policies or that they are simply not interested in following them.
• Over half of the respondents in this study (52%) said that a company’s use of technology was a major factor when they select an employer.

Add in the fact the survey also reinforces the shift away from email as the primary form of electronic communication, and it’s clear that the revolution is happening. It’s just that in most cases, companies aren’t listening, and are investing in the wrong areas.

Back in January 2007, I wrote about how ‘IT could lead the revolution‘, hypothesizing how the IT Support in a company could become valuable for more than just supporting locked down computers - and how they could lead change by allowing everyone to download, install and play with new internet technology, and that responding to the risks this inherently raises means they would be up-to-date and possibly even generating their own ideas and technology.

Since then, the rise of social media etc has seen even more demand for toolbar plugins and access to Adobe Air etc, yet i’m not aware of any firm with IT support that actively operates in this way.

So I’ll throw it back out there and see if anyone knows of a proactive IT dept which encourages users to experiment, and enjoys dealing with the challenges this creates - because there’s even more of a need for that support now than there was 22 months ago.

Particularly as it’s a great way to ensure that human on-site interaction is needed, safeguarding jobs and possibly driving new revenues, rather than increasing automation, documentation and distance encouraging outsourcing.

It’s very rare I purchase a book. The last two were Tribes by Seth Godin, and Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur by Richard Branson, both of which have a lot to teach anyone in business and in social media marketing.

(Incidentally, after writing about Business Stripped Bare, here, a nice young lady named Natalie emailed me to say that there’s a widget to display the first 43 pages of the book, which you can see here. Meanwhile, my thoughts on Tribes and how to get it for free, or just 95p on iTunes are here.)

Anyhow, if you prefer to read from a printed page than a computer screen, then there are two more additions that I can recommend investing in.

The first is Dave Cushman’s The Power of the Network, which collects his white papers and more into a single download for 49p, or in printed form for £4.98 via print-on-demand site Lulu. (Disclosure - Dave is a former colleague and friend of mine - enough that I’m credited in the book!). Well worth reading - or buying for someone who is interested in how social media is changing. It’s particularly interesting due to Dave’s lengthy experience as a print journalist and sub-editor before his ever increasing adoption and insight into the changes multimedia is having on everything around us. He’s running a blogger review programme - and also giving any profits to Kiva, which allows you to fund people to change their lives and make their own way out of poverty.

The second is Jonathan MacDonald’s Every Single One of Us: Vol 1 The Communication Ideal, which looks at the underlying principles and makes bold predictions for the future advertising, marketing and personal brands - and is relevant for anyone in the media, internet and mobile industries. (Disclosure: I’m a very small part of a distinguished list who were involved in supporting and helping it’s creation). Jonathan’s CV speaks for itself! Plus he’s probably the closest thing to a legitimate social media rock star, thanks to his musical talents. It’s a £2.99 download or £14.95 for the print edition, and all the money is going into a collective pot to continue the concepts he’s building as part of a group. You can see it explained in a far better way, here.

Actually, cobblers to it and I’ll add a couple more - Joseph Jaffe is offering a very special deal for people buying certain amounts of his books Life After the 30 Second Spot and Join The Conversation  (I’m a big fan of Join the Conversation), ranging from signed copies to a day’s consulting. Take a look at the offer on his blog, Jaffe Juice.

Now I know a lot of people reading this will probably have heard of these people, read their blogs and be familiar with their work (or at least you should!), but the print editions are perfect educational materials for anyone who still associates a ‘blog’ as being something where a geek talks about how he sits at home on his Xbox, talking to his virtual friends. This might help them realise that in the modern world, everyone is doing it via mobile, internet, their console - and that to really be a geek you’d have to go much further. That’s why I love the fact that Seth Godin references the term Otaku, which I’m familiar with due to my love of video games and Japanese culture. It’s for anyone with an almost obsessive interest in something, whether that’s social media, videogames, motorcycling, football or anything else.

There’s a great William Gibson quote from the Observer used at the end of the Wikipedia article:

‘The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.’

So go and buy some presents for the Otaku who don’t realise that’s what they are, and how the web can empower their interests, specialities, and dreams.

(And seeing as I’ve got the books, I’ll have a smart phone, a net book, an MP3 player and a new car stereo please!)

I’m looking forward to seeing the new book by Jeff Jarvis, ‘What Would Google Do‘, where he reverse-engineers Google and applies the learnings to a variety of different industries.

It’ll definitely be interesting, and I certainly mean no disrespect to his work, but as a purely external observer of the big G, it seems like my own version would be the shortest book in history.

What would Google do? Pretty much everything they could - and then see what works, what gets popular, and what they can monetise - The End!

There’s a great case in point emerging as Google experiments in wringing more from Adsense - for example Adsense in Flash games, Adsense in Google Maps, Click-to-buy on Youtube, Adsense in RSS etc, and now an Adsense search box and adverts for pages of Adsense adverts.

Meanwhile they’ve got enough projects on the go to shake a web pointer at in Google Labs. And that doesn’t even list other properties like Orkut. Which, according to a great global map of social networks by Oxyweb (hat tip to Nick O’Neil) is still ruling the roost in India and Brazil.

Click to see the Oxyweb global social network map in full

And then there’s acquisitions. I don’t even know how many they’ve made over recent years, but certainly they include the likes of Blogger, which I still use for some projects and ideas despite preferring Wordpress now, and Feedburner.

And if you want to see what happens when a Google acquisition doesn’t result in transformational change to a service (and possibly even a downturn in terms of reliability and usability), just keep an eye on a Twitter Search for Feedburner!

And then there’s Google Analytics, Web Optimizer, Google Reader, Gmail, iGoogle, and I can’t even keep up linking to each product!

‘To me, Google appears to differ from most large companies by being almost liquid or gaseous in slipping itself into whatever shape or gap is necessary to permeate into every part of our digital lives (including mobile). And it does it by doing every possible permutation and leaving what works in place’

I think that probably sums up my approach to answering What Would Google Do? But I’m looking to see what Jeff Jarvis has used for his take in the actual book!