IT is a key barrier to corporate Web 2.0 adoption, users say

Computerworld - SAN FRANCISCO - Most speakers at the Office 2.0 conference  here this week agreed that Web 2.0 tools will make their way into the enterprise, propelled by user demand for tools that can make them more productive.

However, they also warned corporate Web 2.0 champions to steel themselves for resistance to the use of blogs, wikis, mashups, social networks and other tools -- especially from IT organizations.

When Adam Carson, an associate at Morgan Stanley, first began pushing the use of Web 2.0 tools, he faced a major obstacle  in the New York-based investment bank's 10,000-member IT department. "Most of our IT department didn't get it," he said. "This was all new to them. They had just been stuck in the world of enterprise IT."

However, he said he worked closely with IT team members to convince them of the merits of Web 2.0, which led them to implement Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) technologies, a key requirement for building and supporting Web 2.0 tools. Once IT was convinced of the value of Web 2.0, he said, the organization was "really good at making sure that [systems] worked really well and didn't break, but they weren't really good at making sure … people liked using them."

Carson noted that the company now has about 80 Web 2.0 projects under way, including an effort to create social networks for its clients.

During the education process, Carson said he also had to find a manager that would require the use of a Web 2.0 tool for a specific project. That would help spur employees to use the new tools, he noted. The effort also faced cultural resistance from some users clinging to the use of e-mail and other traditional tools rather than switch to new Web 2.0 collaboration tools, he added.

Miko Coffey, head of digital media at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA)  in London, noted that she first had to bypass IT to get Web 2.0 technologies to the group's end users. Once she started the effort, she said, "IT started to realize it was happening without them anyway. They weren't interested until they started to get multiple requests from around the business. Eventually, they came on board."

Coffey said that the organization is using the bookmarking site Del.icio.us  to help gather all the links needed to put together an e-mail newsletter, and tools like Central Desktop from Central Desktop Inc. for project management and collaboration. She said it is often easier for a smaller organizations like NESTA, which has 90 employees, to adopt such new technologies because they often don't need to be integrated into large, complex enterprise systems.