Instead of my usual diatribes and digs this week, I offer you more of an extended 'think piece'.
One obvious trend of the past few years has been how societal changes have impacted on business expectations, while another has been how Web 2.0 technologies have transformed customer expectations, and how people interact with each other.
The end result is that information – and therefore change – moves at Internet speed, while technology gives people unprecedented means to talk about things and to organise themselves into groups or information-sharing communities.
Ultimately, these twin strands of change meet and challenge the enterprise, especially as the downturn deepens and news travels ever faster in our always-on, wireless world.
What this means for the enterprise and for public sector organisations is that, yes, you can communicate faster and across multiple channels with your customers – if you are canny enough to recognise those channels, deploy them, and integrate them with other channels – but, equally, customers can talk about you and how you are getting it wrong.
The fact they want to do so readily, swiftly, and in vast numbers is why Bebo, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn and the like are each worth billions dollars. And yet many companies beieve this has nothing to do with them.
It was ten years ago that I interviewed several music industry CEOs about the threat to their business from the Internet: none saw it coming; all saw it as a marginal influence.
I think I was the first journalist to recognise that the Internet was not a technology issue for them, but a problem of intellectual property on the one hand, and a means to share and interact directly with consumers on the other.
The music industry is founded on intellectual property, not sales, and yet none of them had even considered the problem. Meanwhile, just outside their doors, a tidal wave of change and chatter was about to engulf them.
In a short space of time, all that apparently irrelevant chatter online can build into a seriously loud noise: witness how data and hardware losses across several government departments have swiftly discredited the Home Office (and its head), the Ministry of Defence, HM Revenue & Customs, the DVLA, and also those organisations' private sector outsourcing partners.
The most recent of those has been PA Consulting, whose professional reputation has been sullied all too publicly by one person mislaying a USB datastick of criminals' details.
Today, millions of people are discussing the failures of a company that, just a week ago, most had never heard of. Add to that another (often overlooked) factor: yesterday's news is no longer wrapping today's fish and chips. It's stored on a chip and a searchable archive. Bad news travels fast, but today it lasts forever.
In effect, whoever last held that memory stick – smaller than a cigarette lighter – was holding a company's and a government's reputation (perhaps even a nation's security) in his or her hand, together with the means to ignite it.
The bigger problem for government now is how that same chatter is building into a negative campaign against ID cards, for example. A few isolated incidents have come together to create a huge strategic problem for Whitehall.
And yet it was all so predictable, and obvious to even the most casual observer. In the background, mass data storage had become a commodity anyone could buy for a few pennies on the high street, and carry around on a key fob. Why did no one in government even consider the implications?
It's no surprise, then, that many companies are realising that it is no use reacting to change long after the event; it is far better to predict it, or to be in the vanguard of it (rather than jogging along breathlessly behind, complaining about the disruption).
Any ten-year-old could have told your enterprise that MySpace, YouTube, Bebo, Facebook and the like would have a massive impact on your business, for the simple reason they have changed our expectations of a/ how we communicate with each other and b/ how technology ought to be easy and intuitive – indeed, almost invisible – to use.
Why then have so many companies sought to immure themselves behind vast, unwieldly, cumbersome onsite enterprise applications even as the rest of the world has become faster, leaner, more nimble, and more online?
The good news is that Gartner, among others, has identified the problem too. As IT-based devices and technologies become more personal in scope and application, social issues will become increasingly important to product success, says the analyst giant.
To identify and react to major societal shifts and trends, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2010, 15 percent of US and European businesses will have formalised societal trendwatching as a corporate discipline.
“A connected enterprise must understand the connected society in which it resides,” says Scott Nelson, managing VP at Gartner.
“Most firms wait until societal trends have overwhelmed them before they try to react. Slowness to respond can cost firms incredibly large sums of money and may drive them out of business all together.
“Businesses will require anthropological and psychological input into system development to ensure that entire systems consisting of technology and people are viable, and to help evaluate how changes in employees’ and customers’ lifestyles will affect business,” he concluded.
This is analyst-speak for anything that millions of people are using and discussing today probably affected you yesterday, and is certainly something you should listen to today.
Of course, the danger that many organisations run into is trying to determine which trends to watch, says Gartner. The lessons of the past decade suggest it is often the apparently innocuous ones as much as it is the headline-grabbers: multi-gigabyte data storage on a stick (that least sexy of technologies) has undermined several pillars of central government.
Gartner says it recommends giving responsibility to a group to watch societal trends and to focus on the following points to maximise short-term and strategic decisions while positioning the business for the future:
• Social factors will become increasingly important in business and commercial systems. Adopt a human-centric design perspective. Watch these factors on an ongoing basis.
• Appoint staff to review systems and working practices to identify legal, ethical and social risks.
• Conduct an opportunity/threat analysis to identify product and service opportunities enabled by the connected society.
• Understand and exploit network effects in products and services.
• Explore the opportunities to use network effects and the connected society to solve business and government problems in new ways.
• Privacy is a way of life and a business strategy decision, not a technical issue. Appoint a privacy officer.
Now, this is all very well and hardly rocket science, you'd think, but analysts make a good living selling the obvious to the cash-rich.
So I have one piece of advice for free: it's not the technology, it's the people. Put them first, think about them first, and the rest follows much more easily.
Many companies in the 1990s employed so-called 'futurologists' to devine a gilded future for their employers. The reality is that most were glorified marketing people who existed to place their employer's brands in the vanguard of sexy, technology-assisted change. And yet almost none of them identified the bleeding obvious at the bleeding edge, and none of them saw the kind of issues that have undone so many organisations, markets, and businesses in recent years.
So get real, people: that piece of kit in your hand... who uses, how, and why? What are the implications of this? Why do people enjoy using Google and Facebook, but hate using your bespoke enterprise system?
See, it's not difficult, is it?