There are risks associated with adopting any new technology, and Enterprise 2.0 is no different. Enterprise 2.0 holds the promise of dramatically increasing business productivity, stimulating greater innovation, and creating tighter connections between employees, as well as with partners, suppliers and customers.
Enterprise 2.0 fear factor: Overcoming risks, uncertainties and doubts
While these technologies and other social networking software are facilitating knowledge sharing, accelerating team communications, fostering increased collaboration and online communities creation, many executives are recognising their value. Still, they worry about losing control of information, compromising sensitive data, opening their networks to security breaches or even exposing employees to time-killing “network noise”.
Liability for a potentially illegal activity involving workers, risk of malware infections, bandwidth constraints and other drop-offs in employee productivity are obvious reasons why the “open social Internet” goes against the instincts of many Chief Information Officers.
It is also true that employees using these systems for group collaboration, usually operate outside the approved IT applications, meaning they aren’t actually subject to enterprise policies governing compliance and information protection. It is obviously a challenge for any IT professional to give up control over the IT systems they depend on. As Enterprise 2.0 is decentralised and ad hoc, control is in the hands of users rather than the IT department …
