Social Networks
As part of our CIO focus at Dhara, we like to keep current on trends in the IT Industry. Last year when we began to look at Web 2.0, it was apparent that some of the mash-up techniques had legs inside of the enterprise. In discussion with our stakeholders and contacts in large US companies, it was also apparent that CIO’s were trying to get their hands around the social networking component of “Web 2.0”.
Last week I saw a survey one the plans to deploy social networks inside of the enterprise, and it is apparent that the vast majority of CIO’s are open to this, and that about the same number are concerned about security implications – as soon as I verify that we can link to this survey, I will edit this post and include the link.
So, many believe that it is time for companies to look at the use of the social networking components of the Web 2.0 technology base. We assume that IT people want to determine how they can be used inside of the enterprise to decrease the need for physical travel and increase the contribution of team members to the finished product – which is always important in any systems development lifecycle.
This week we are looking at one of those tools – and the potential impact to the CIO’s office. The tool is Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) which is a tool that allows messages to be routed to a cell phone or sms client. While the product’s stated intention is to keep track of people using a “publish – subscribe” model, the ramifications for business use are great – which means that your users and probably some of your staff has been using it already.
Basically a user searches for his or her buddies and subscribes to information that they post and these subscriptions can be filtered. This type of model ahs been used for business applications like data synchronization for close to ten years now. But the use of it using chat clients and cell phones and allowing individual users to set it up should be looked at from a corporate risk perspective if it has not already been done. How many messages are being sent to your cell phones now? And at what cost? Do you have a policy regarding its use?
An interesting application though offers potential for use as an alerting mechanism. On Tech TV last week, a Twitter user talked about the use of Twitter to route messages to him from his plant telling him that it needed watered – and the plant was even polite enough to thank him for doing so. So putting a monitoring mechanism on his plat that is Internet enabled and creating alerts is a cool idea – one that had me thinking about monitoring my home and sending me messages to that I could subscribe to in a variety of form factors. It also made me remember how many different alerting mechanisms we had in the last environment that I had to manage and how much the infrastructure cost.
At Dhara, we are looking at the infrastructure used by Twitter and will report back on how we are able to apply this technology safely in our environment as we go forward. In the meantime, if you would like to discuss projects like these, please feel free to email us at sales@dharacg.com
Fred Geiger
www.dharacg.com style="font-family: Verdana;">
Last week I saw a survey one the plans to deploy social networks inside of the enterprise, and it is apparent that the vast majority of CIO’s are open to this, and that about the same number are concerned about security implications – as soon as I verify that we can link to this survey, I will edit this post and include the link.
So, many believe that it is time for companies to look at the use of the social networking components of the Web 2.0 technology base. We assume that IT people want to determine how they can be used inside of the enterprise to decrease the need for physical travel and increase the contribution of team members to the finished product – which is always important in any systems development lifecycle.
This week we are looking at one of those tools – and the potential impact to the CIO’s office. The tool is Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) which is a tool that allows messages to be routed to a cell phone or sms client. While the product’s stated intention is to keep track of people using a “publish – subscribe” model, the ramifications for business use are great – which means that your users and probably some of your staff has been using it already.
Basically a user searches for his or her buddies and subscribes to information that they post and these subscriptions can be filtered. This type of model ahs been used for business applications like data synchronization for close to ten years now. But the use of it using chat clients and cell phones and allowing individual users to set it up should be looked at from a corporate risk perspective if it has not already been done. How many messages are being sent to your cell phones now? And at what cost? Do you have a policy regarding its use?
An interesting application though offers potential for use as an alerting mechanism. On Tech TV last week, a Twitter user talked about the use of Twitter to route messages to him from his plant telling him that it needed watered – and the plant was even polite enough to thank him for doing so. So putting a monitoring mechanism on his plat that is Internet enabled and creating alerts is a cool idea – one that had me thinking about monitoring my home and sending me messages to that I could subscribe to in a variety of form factors. It also made me remember how many different alerting mechanisms we had in the last environment that I had to manage and how much the infrastructure cost.
At Dhara, we are looking at the infrastructure used by Twitter and will report back on how we are able to apply this technology safely in our environment as we go forward. In the meantime, if you would like to discuss projects like these, please feel free to email us at sales@dharacg.com
Fred Geiger
www.dharacg.com
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