exactly; IT pros are a more conservative lot
I chuckle when reading this statement, because it accurately represents the naive perspective of certain social media practitioners and software designers who possess little enterprise experience. The notion that these enlightened technology leaders will somehow storm the enterprise gates, releasing an imprisoned populace amid throngs and cheers, is laughable.
Social media will succeed on a large scale when its adherents fully understand enterprise software purchasing goals and politics. The set of issues surrounding enterprise software purchases is complex, to the extent that a product’s ability to solve a particular business problem is often only one element in a larger decision matrix that includes reliability, security, performance, and so on. Contrast this to consumer software purchasing decisions, where the sole criteria are usually features and price.
I’m also pretty sure that this blog is the main reason I made the list. My original article on Enterprise 2.0 appeared just about two years ago in Sloan Management Review and has been pretty popular in reprints and downloads. But my blog has received almost 6.5 million page hits since its launch. I’m quite confident that the total number of desks that have been crossed by my articles and papers pales in comparison to the total number of desktops that have displayed my blog.
The higher up you go in the corporate food chain, the more likely it is for the participant to worry about the consequences of what's shared publicly. Some online communities address this by permitting anonymous posts (so that a participant can feel safe in writing "Is it time for me to leave my job?"); others do so with avatars that cloud identity (so a forum member could write comfortably, "We're having a lot of problems with security at our company;
exactly; IT pros are a more conservative lot