CIOs share Web 2.0 strategies

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Speaker: Web 2.0 in a large enterprise, is it gonna be a separate set of products delivered by a separate set of company that build enterprise versions of those products? Are you going to allow, eventually embrace, and even start developing APIs into those tool sets that many of your employees certainly use at home or probably using at work as well? Get into a discussion about Web 2.0 and a large enterprise

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Speaker: I think it's a reality. I mean we had the some problem with the instant messenger 10, 15 years ago, and most companies -- there's some companies blocked it, and some realized they had to live with it. And this blurring of what is the identity of the individual? Is it on behalf of the enterprise, or is it as individual, is something that we need to figure out how to do because I do think that, as you say, that people live on Facebook. They live on LinkedIn. They live on a number of these tools, and they are becoming de facto business tools in a lot of cases. So we got to find out what role does it play? Do we actually own the identity of the individual when they use this? And can we manage that on behalf of the enterprise? And I am seeing -- I mean, it's really the bane of software to service, right? You've got to control the identity management of the front end and consider inaudible of information in the back end. And those problems have not been really solved yet.

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Speaker: Good point. You know, I'd tell you that it depends on your -- the kind of associate base that you have employed by the company. And, you know, in retail, it's a little different than if you're in an office environment. So, you know, you really want the folks dealing with the customer in the store and less in front of a terminal or a device and engaging the customers, those sorts of things, helping them with problems. Now there is a place, obviously, for those sorts of things with dealing with our -- talking to our customers and how they want to be talked to and, you know, spoken to, whether it be through Twitter or through some of the other social sites, around how to do a project for their house or a remodel. And maybe having, you know, some groups that allow people to collaborate on a project, or those sorts of things. And we're thinking about how those things could play in how we connect with our customers, probably more so than -- we are associates in some ways. We've got a pilot right now going on with some social media, some social interaction things that we're doing. And that seems to be going real well. But it's gonna be kind of developing as we go. And if you think about how you deal with a pro customer, or the contractor, versus the do-it-yourself person, or the person that really is coming in for other things, advice, etcetera, the -- you know, very different in a lot of ways. And so, you know, that -- those kind of media -- that kind of media will help us connect with those customers in the way that they want to be connected to.

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Speaker: You know, I -- we spend a lot of time, as CIOs in IT community, and technologists, talking about the technology aspect of the Web 2.0. And in the enterprises, there's this huge fear -- I see so many young people here -- that fewer kids are coming out with engineering degrees in computer science. And we have an aging population, and one day, you know, my son is gonna kind of take over the world that we're in. And he's not gonna want to work for us because we don't have Facebook. He probably wants to eat and pay for his apartment, so the fact that I don't have Facebook, he doesn't say, you know, "I'm gonna work for Google." There's only so many Google jobs in the --

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Speaker: Fewer and fewer.

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Speaker: Yeah, fewer and fewer. And so I think this kind of internal, we're gonna have to do this because it's a younger and younger demo that's gonna come in and work, has been a lot of the focus that we've had, probably for the last couple years. Overly, you know, this coming shortage. The economic crisis has thrown so many IT people onto the street, it's gonna -- it's a little further off than we thought. I think more and more, the Web 2.0 becomes how does the collaboration elements that are being built actually enable the business model that you're working on? So we have fewer and fewer sales people, for instance, with experience in the field that are there. How do you get the information that they need to as quickly as possible? That's like an actual problem that's being solved, and they all carry phones around. I can tell you there isn't one of our sales force that's thinking to themselves, "Twitter." I think that if they're thinking that, it's not -- they're not thinking that the way we are all thinking it in the room here. But I can tell you, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, none of them were thinking that they were going to do their banking at the ATM and never see a banker, either. So I think that they sort of are progressing. It's -- I was thinking it was a generational thing with collaboration. And it's not. It's really -- it's really business. It's really business related. My own personal opinion, Pete, it's -- the companies that figure out how to build collaborative fabrics, which meet the culture of the company exactly where it is because big companies like Baxter have a way -- we have a scientific collaboration vibe going on. In the auto industry, it was a different type of innovative design, an operational excellence vibe. But if you can build something that actually, then, starts to dip into and meet the culture and solve the problems, it's gonna, like, really mean competitive advantage for the company.

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