Every cloud (computing) has a silver lining...

Interesting to read in the Financial Times yesterday that "the current economic crisis could force Web 2.0 into the business mainstream" as "A downturn raises questions about how organisations are structured and how they tap into the knowledge and expertise of employees, suppliers and customers". Indeed the mere fact that the FT sees Web2.0/Enterprise2.0 as a topic worthy of analysis is, in itself, evidence of its growing acceptance throughout the worlds of commerce and industry.

The piece also offers a nice summary of the perceived advantages of Enterprise 2.0 which provides organisations with most of what makes the Web 2.0 movement so exciting whilst also providing the reassurance of offering "audit trails, access control, version control, authentication, provisioning and back-up" (all words to warm the cockles of a records manager's heart).

As those who have read Managing the Crowd or heard me speak on this know I have always been a little sceptical about whether Enterprise 2.0 really is a sustainable longterm option or whether it will always be a compromise too far which ends up pleasing no one. I still have some concerns on this score, but, by the same token if it instead represents a temporary stepping stone towards a bolder future then that may be a different matter altogether

New year, new predictions

It always fascinates me how the dawn of a new year seems to bring out the soothsayer in us, with all manner of commentators and observers from all walks of life taking the opportunity to predict what the year ahead will bring. Well this is a temptation that I intend to resist, but that doesn't stop me from being interested in the efforts of others.

One, in particular, has been brought to my attention my Andrew Warland, a fellow contributor to the Records Management2.0 Ning site and relates to 2009 being the year that the internet truly goes mobile

Coming after a year when data loss scandals were virtually a weekly occurrence it remains to be seen whether this hints at a solution (with less losable data being stored locally on remote devices) or a likely escalation of the problem. Hopefully the former...

I was also struck by the sentence "The brittleness of PC metaphors on mobile devices coupled with the concept of context speaks to an emergent and important trend on the horizon – smart and intuitive interfaces that predict user intent through an understanding of relationships", not least because I'm trying to find time at the moment to write a paper for the Records Management Journal entitled 'Forget Electronic Records Management, its Automated Records Management that we desperately need' which will say that this is exactly the route that the RM community also needs to be going down: using technology to intelligently assess both the information and its context and to automatically make management decisions accordingly.