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Given the event’s strong attendance, that promise resonated with its audience, and more importantly, it was delivered according to the attendees with whom I spoke. They also credited Nathaniel for ensuring that the senior IT staff attending the event had the opportunity to understand the management implications created by collaborative technology like blogs, wikis and RSS.
Attendees could learn about these issues in my presentation, “Leveraging Social Software and the Technologies of Web 2.0.” We enjoyed lively interaction in the session, especially around the generation gap relating to the usage of social software.
A number of heads nodded when I put up the famous quotation by Max Planck, father of quantum physics: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Planck’s observation is relevant to social software, because as Prescient’s President, Toby Ward, has blogged: CIOs don’t respect social media. Their adoption rate and, more significantly, personal usage of these tools trails that of the MySpace generation, who now spend an average of 1 hour and 22 minutes a day using their computer for social networking. This usage contrasts to the 51% of CIOs for whom social networking has “no interest/not on radar screen,” according to the CIO Magazine study that Toby references.
A participant in the session provided an excellent reason for why this generation gap must be taken very seriously by the senior IT people who decide what technology an organization’s employees can use within its environment. Not only was she a senior manager in a large high tech firm, she also lectures at an engineering college. Each year, she hands the graduating students a form they can use to evaluate prospective employers, with a key criteria being the technology they make available for online learning and social networking.
Every manager is, or should be, aware that winning the competition for talent is a critical success factor today. It would be a shame for an organization to lose this battle because its CIO is ignoring the world outside her server room.
Credit goes to Nathaniel for keeping social networking on the radar screen for attendees at his conference, and to the participants in my session who are deploying the technology to good use in their companies, but always looking for ways to do it better.
