I have read a couple of articles in the last few days which got me thinking about the rising trend of collaboration, which not only seems to be having an increased effect in the enterprise but even in the esteemed Houses of Parliament.
The first article, published in last week’s Computing, looks at the benefits of collaboration via web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, such as instant messaging, social networking sites, wikis, blogs, podcasts etc. The article applauds the advent of a collaborative era led by a new generation of up-and-coming, web 2.0-trained, young things, but simultaneously laments the lack of skilled workers having already infiltrated the world of enterprise IT. This is an idea maintained by one of our clients, Psytechnics, who recently carried out a survey on the very topic which proved Martin Courtney’s suspicion that there is a lack of “collaborative knowledge 2.0” amongst the IT industry.
The second article appeared this morning in the Editorial and Reply section of The Guardian, opening with Sir Thomas More’s description of Utopia, a place where “nobody owns anything, but everyone is rich”, as an analogy for collaboration via the open source movement (genius!). The author goes on to suggest that Gordon Brown could claw his way back to at least moderate popularity by adopting internet collaboration as his next “big idea”, not only by bring broadband to the masses but also by following in the footsteps of the big technology companies such as IBM and Google in adopting open source software in governmental departments. Coincidentally Brown’s Treasury does less than 1% of its operations with open source which The Guardian highlights as contrary to the cooperative spirit held up by the Labour party in past times. I hate to agree outright with David Cameron but it seems like he might have hit the nail on the head this time when he described Gordon as “an analogue politician in a digital age”. I wonder if he has his own Facebook page…
Tags: colloboration, politics, Technology, web 2.0
