I’ve been asked to blog at Internet Evolution, a TechWeb property. My first post just went up this morning. Going forward I intend to evaluate software for IT professionals. It doesn’t seem, to me, like their are a lot of software evaluators in the blogosphere who address the needs of IT. I expect to cover new/social, open source, or free technologies for IT and trends affecting the IT professional and manager. I think this should prove especially salient for IT during our current economic downturn.
Internet Evolution – Aaron Roe Fulkerson – How, and Why, End Users Circumvent IT
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Enterprise IT has been changing, or evolving if you like. The challenges of IT have grown more complex, spending habits are in flux, and technology adoption patterns are shifting. There are some key forces driving the changes in enterprise IT, but let’s take a quick look at the increasing complexity of enterprise IT.
A long time ago (meaning, a few years back), the IT department had only to combat rogue deployments of desktop software in business departments, such as Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, the latter of which could often have more business logic than most of today’s Web 2.0 applications. Now, however, companies have a plethora of insurgent server-based applications that are proliferating both inside the firewall and outside in the “cloud.”
Who’s deploying and feeding these guerrilla applications (often of dubious engineering quality and even more questionable security)? It’s the users in the business departments [gasps of horror] who are installing and driving adoption independent of IT sanction and governance. The business users are taking matters into their own hands in an effort to improve their productivity and remain competitive. They’re turning to easy-to-use and flexible tools like wikis, blogs, lightweight CMSes, social bookmarking tools, and others that are often grouped under the category of Enterprise 2.0.
Aaron Fulkerson 