Stowe Boyd builds on a post in January, pointing out yet again that work is evolving away from groups and toward the individual:
First of all, I believe that because of the way that we live and work the individual is the new group [see my original post on this from January]. Stated differently, apps that purport to help us order our work should start by solving the problems of the individual, realizing that one of the issues involved in work is sharing with others.
So, I am amazed to see how many apps continue the old, old ways, where membership in groups is the primary (if not only) notion at work. All of these apps that support projects as a collection of folders into which we move documents and people get access to them through group membership.
All of which is a why you see startups -- such as JackBe, Coghead, and LongJump, and more recently BEA and IBM -- delivering mashups for the rest of us. These products assume that users, not traditional developers, will create the applications -- and business -- of tomorrow. The collective brain trust that is the user community is IT's greatest asset.
I made this point last year in an April 11th post in CMP's VoIPLine newsletter. By embracing -- even encouraging -- the uber-user, IT gets a homegrown SWAT team that can respond far faster to the business than traditional ITers because the members of that team are part of the business:
....Yet precisely those uber-users constituting the brain trust will help IT translate business requirements into technology imperatives. Group and department managers understand the needs of their respective business units, but they're vision may be myopic. In some instances, they may fail to grasp the working realities of their people. In other cases, they may lack the know-how to pinpoint what problems might be solved with today's technology.
Uber-users, on the other hand, are often pondering or grappling with the problems IT will look to solve in the future. "Power users are the bleeding edge of technology usage. By understanding the challenges and success of the power users, IT can develop the best practices and lessons learned before the technology is deployed companywide," says Zeus Kerravala, vice president of the Yankee Group.
By filtering technology suggestions and insights from this bleeding-edge group through its management, IT can received an in-depth, sanity-checked view of organizations' requirements from the folks in the field.
IT could then bring these early technology adopters into an extended 'first-strike team.' This team would become the beta group for the enterprise, ultimately the organic support crew throughout the organization, and the watchdogs on potential security threats....
