Unified Collaboration | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Facebook is topping Google ? If I were an IT guy I would wonder why…

As you may have heard these last weeks, Facebook topped Google for the first time. Not in market value but in hits. Anecdote for some, beginning of a new era for others, many things have been said about that. On the other hand, it’s was a general public event and many may have thought that it had very few importance for the walled world of corporate IT and did not deserve more attention than a secondera phenomenon.

In this post I’ll try to measure the extent of the news and, then, wonder if it means anything special for corporate IT departments.

That’s “only” Google !

Let’s stick to the facts : Facebook got more connexions than Google and that’s all. It does not mean that “more than the half of all connections on the web took plage on Facebook”. Google is not the web and Facebook won’t become the web either even if that’s a goal that’s not hidden at all. This only fact is enough to dampen some kind of enthusiasm.

So let’s avoid conclusions such as “people don’t want to live outside of social networks anymore”, “Facebook is the web”, “Facebook will replace the web” etc.. It may become true one day but the existing numbers can’t make us draw such conclusions at this point.

Now imagine we’re at an IT department’s place.

The collaboration 2.0 thing has now been discussed for a few years. Beyond trendy words, that’s nothing more than making people develop collaborative pratices in a more informal fashion, less contrainsted by organizational rigidities, in ordre to access more easily to the right nformations and people to solve the problems that appear in their workaday life. The final purpose is nothing but favoring workaday efficiency in tasks exection and project delivery without any kind of philisophical considerations. And behind the many words that have been used to avoid the use of old worlds, it’s all about collaboration, namely on a new scale and fashion, but still about collaboration.

Experience also teaches us that implementing a new model is not that easy and that making people adopt it is an actual challenge. But do these models that are focused on the point where people have to get take into account where they depart from and what are their constraints ?

What do employees / users tell us ?

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