CTO Blog
Well it’s a kind of alternative build on my colleague Ron’s blog piece on what the CIO, or CTO, should try out on as a personal use before recommending wider adoption in their enterprise. Out there is a site that found the 100 best web applications based on votes from 489,467 people. This started with an initial exercise in open nomination providing a list with an incredible 5000 nominations, too big to be sensible, and it seemed possible that there might be some sad people nominating their own creations! So the site editors cut this back to their choice of 250 web apps, and invited a further round of voting to find the final list of the 100 Best Web Apps.
An excellent case of using the principles of Web 2.0, and even social computing, to create, and share experiences, but just pause for a minute to reflect on the scale of this. Firstly that there were slightly more than 5000 recognisable web apps that could be accessed as part of the nomination process, try that rate of progress in the creation of regular client server applications at a similar stage of their technology cycle as a comparison. The second point is that half a million people found this site, and decided to register, and vote.
Take a look at politics in your country, and the turnout for elections. Point made?
Is the argument that the process and technology allows more ready participation, or is it something else? Something like this exercise seems to the people voting to be more interesting, more immediate, and more important? I don’t know, but it would sure worry me if I was a politician as to whether I had really grasped the issues that interest people today.
This brings me to the real point; Ron is asking about the use of the new technology by informed people to do the tasks that they value, so they should have the knowledge to give a good opinion. However we have a whole generation of Business Managers who may not have the knowledge, some would argue the interest even, to make these types of evaluations, but currently business adoption depends on these people understanding business cases based on business value. It’s a huge gap, and ultimately I suspect is going to be the issue that separates the winners, and losers, in terms of enterprises competing in the markets.
The Winners will be the ones with the people in place to take a new generation of decisions based on entirely new factors, for the losers it will be a case of waiting till the situation warrants a change of management. That’s easy for me to suggest, more effective would be to ask the question how does an experienced, and otherwise effective, senior company manager get mentored into being able to play a role in these types of decisions? My answer is reverse mentoring; a younger competent employee spending time each week with the senior manager to walk them round these new capabilities so that they can see where, and how, they might ‘change the game’ for their businesses by using these new capabilities.
A site with the top 100 web apps all nicely identified is a great place for this to start!
About the author
Capgemini Global Chief Technology Officer, Andy is a member of the Capgemini Group management board and advises on all aspects of technology-driven market changes, together with being a member of the Policy Board for the British Computer Society. Andy is the author of many white papers, and the co-author three books that have charted the current changes in technology and its use by business starting in 2006 with ‘Mashup Corporations’ detailing how enterprises could make use of Web 2.0 to develop new go to market propositions. This was followed in May 2008 by Mesh Collaboration focussing on the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise front office and its working techniques, then in 2010 “Enterprise Cloud Computing: A Strategy Guide for Business and Technology leaders” co-authored with well-known academic Peter Fingar and one of the leading authorities on business process, John Pyke. The book describes the wider business implications of Cloud Computing with the promise of on-demand business innovation. It looks at how businesses trade differently on the web using mash-ups but also the challenges in managing more frequent change through social tools, and what happens when cloud comes into play in fully fledged operations. Andy was voted one of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the world in 2009 by InfoWorld and is grateful to readers of Computing Weekly who voted the Capgemini CTOblog the best Blog for Business Managers and CIOs each year for the last three years.
Andy, here in Sweden we are actually experience a bit of that reverse mentoring you mention. The VP that hired me have shown great interest in these topics and are anxious to start a blog about public affairs. My last blog post spins directly from discussions with him and public officials and I would say is a great example of young meeting experienced to come up with a great topic.
By the way I can’t wait till Capgemini implements a take on the Zoho suite, especially now when they have released the Creator 2.0-tool which provides for extremely simple lightweight database programming online. I am currently building a event management system for our little group in Stockholm to show the benefits of it all.
currently where ever i go there are people or small groups experimenting with new capabilities that allow them to do things quickly and fast.
The secret is that these things are interactive for the benefit of a group of people and not like traditional applications which are data centric for the good of the enterprise
now the challenge is to determine how to not just allow these two worlds to co-exist but to find how to make them combine for maximum effectiveness.
Very true. I have just started using the beautiful Creator and immediately I stumble across the fact that I want to access our HR database to pull out some data. However, I realise the challenge to decide which data to be published and how to publish it for security reasons.
But imagine the future where all lightweight webwares are published on the companys intranet, free for everyone to use and to modify. Forget standalone spreadsheets scattered around the organisation on peoples lap (or desk) tops.