04
June
2009
|
05:04 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Twitter and Facebook In Corporations: IT Professionals Are Often The Most Reactionary To Change

David Greenfield over at ZDNet, asks: "Why Does IT Hate Facebook and Twitter?"


With as much as the media might talk about the “new enterprise” and “social media” you’d think that IT would be in lock-step with the rest of the business when it came to social networking. But as my recent work with Michael Osterman shows, there’s a big difference between applications that are allowed by organizations and the ones IT professionals consider to be legitimate.


Osterman Research surveyed IT organizations of all sizes from across a wide range of industry. While half of the responding organizations allowed Facebook (Figure 1), only 28 percent of respondents thought the application to be legitimate (Figure 2). The same goes for Twitter, which was allowed by 49.2 percent of the organizations and yet viewed as illegitimate by just 28.3 percent of respondents.


He included these charts:


Applications allowed and not allowed.


ITapplications.jpg


Legitimate and not legitimate applications



LegitamateIT.jpgForemski's Take: I'm not surprised by the results of this survey. In my experience the IT department within most organizations is the most reactionary group resistant to any change. We've seen it so many times. It is the various other departments within a corporation that have to almost smuggle in new technologies, and then the IT department is gradually dragged kicking and screaming into supporting it internally.



I don't blame them. Every department seeks greater control and extension of their domain. And the natural reaction to new technologies has to be one of suspicion and evaluation. Plus IT departments already have a ton of stuff to do and piling on more projects isn't going to be welcomed.



But it often seems that if things were left up to the IT department we'd all still be working with green text monitors.