Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

InfoWorld published an interesting report today, saying essentially that the new Web 2.0 paradigm apps, meaning those which promote greater interactivity with the others, including social media apps, were confusing to 74% of businesses surveyed. I followed the InfoWorld article to AIIM, who did the survey, and from there to a further article in CIO magazine. Chasing information around the internet can be confusing, too. ;o)

The survey asked businesses about software such as social networks, wikis, and blogs. Strangely enough, those 74% that found the new apps confusing must have some overlap, mathematically, with the 44% who found them to be “imperative” or “significantly important.” This would seem to indicate that at least some of the business people surveyed were even more confused than they thought they were.

I have run across a number of blogs and articles lately which indicated much the same thing. One was by an old-line business owner, who saw no value in any of this new social networking technology. He was going to keep doing the same things as he had always done, and would just trust those things to keep working. That was my take-away from most of these items.

What the old-line managers and owners fail to realize is that the world is changing around them; what worked as recently as ten years ago often does not work nearly as well today, and some of the new technologies are where the action is. I cannot help but think of all the businesses that continued to manufacture horse-drawn wagons and buggy whips even after the automobile became popular, thinking that cars were a fad.

Like the automobile, on-line connectivity among people is not a fad. It is a new way of networking, of getting things done, and of marketing your product, doing customer service, and of doing business in general. It is up to us (and I'm sure that you are one of us who understands this new paradigm) to do some upward education wherever we work. If your business lets the world go by long enough, your company can get stuck with a lot of buggy whips!