Prophet Talking at the Speed of Business

I’m checking out what people shared about their experience Monday evening at the Social Media Club, Silicon Valley hosted at Intel headquarters. I’ll write up another post this week when I have a little more time to reflect. But first, this…Someone in Facebook described Jeremiah Owyang, strolling up to the podium with think black book in this hand….he looked like a prophet. Aptly put, any which way you think about it…he’s a prophet sparing time, insights, always a helping hand with a finger pointing forward, move ahead, avante!

Jeremiah let’s fly brimstone, bleeding edge wisdom and can zero in on specifics backed by examples or data. Sometimes both. Here’s another helpful list to train our eyes on. Enterprises might watch for these potential ills as more marketers speed to add new tools that help companies and people connect with clients and audiences. The list, followed by Jeremiah’s business “fix.”

* Disparate user experiences to customers and employees
* Information spread off the firewall, some potentially sensitive
* Risk of enterprise 2.0 vendors being acquired by a competitor
* Real time information being spread at the “edges” of the company, where there was one before corporate communications
* Multiple login systems
* Multiple identity systems spread from system to systems
* Systems that may not talk to each other, now or in the future.
* Business program managers that leave the company or position, orphaning any technology deployment deployed at the business level
* Business groups paying for web programs in different locations, different budgets
* Lack of a cohesive web strategy

clipped from www.web-strategist.com The fix? IT moving at the speed of business Business units, IT groups, and Enterprise 2.0 vendors need to work closely together to deploy programs across the enterprise. I, we, you, would love to see IT to rise to the occassion and get ahead of the demand curve. Get aware of what’s happening, build connections internally. Get educated, attend enterprise 2.0 conferences and events. Initiate a dialogue with business units fast and early. Your business analysts can stay close to the groups, gather information and help drive a real strategy. Experiment with new technology (give time and resources to those wide eyed employees in IT you see who may adopt these tools) and deploy quickly. Be flexible as business and technology changes over time. Sure, there are going to be changes at the speed of business, but that’s far better than doing nothing.

One other cool thing from Jeremiah’s blog was this interesting, but not quite there video. It’s about MediaSnackers. This is a great premise — young people are the new www = getting info and entertainment whenever, wherever and whatever. But JO argues it’s not just young people. There are pleanty of us almost middle aged MediaSnackers. But the point is, are people acknowledging and respecting this short, random media consumption trend? Two-minuteTV on phones, 100MB or 10-minute video file limits on YouTube, mash-ups….but I’d say it’s not quite a mega-trend. But people are consuming and doing more, so where’s the time go/come from? Maybe by building in efficiency into stories we share.