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Television is the first truly democratic culture – the first culture available to everyone and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people want. — Clive Burns
A first blush sociology and IT may seem distant concepts. Over the last two years, these subjects and functions have had a head on collision. Some say for the better. Some say for the worse.
Sociology deals with people and the social side of people. How people relate to one another, how society behaves, and how culture drives society all are the domain of sociology.
Business is fundamentally about relationships and communication. The same inter-relationships, communications, and culture which are part of sociology are the critical aspects and provide the fuel for conducting business. The possible means for your organization to share information, collaborate on work, and ultimately drive corporate culture has dramatically changed recently.
Once upon a time, the facsimile machine was the shiny new way to share documents. Today information comes in many forms, resides in many locations, and is shared in many ways. “Social technologies” have become the new fax machine.
Today the general population of everyone’s workforce have more than a passing fluency in social technologies such as instant messaging for point to point communication, Twitter for broadcasting to a group of people, Facebook for sharing more permanent information, Wikipedia for a complete and general understanding of almost any topic. These technologies are part of your workforces mindset. Younger people will not only be fluent with this set of technologies but cannot believe that expectations would be to work in any other way.
As we are moving towards a confluence of a.) mainstream social technology, b.) younger leadership with significant influence, and c.) the number of quality products to enable the stated and unstated needs for how people want to do their work, the culture within your company will (if it hasn’t already started) change.
This is a big deal. How you address this and hopefully get in front of this cultural shift is important.
It is not as easy as finding and signing up everyone to a dozen social technologies. There are technical issues around security, privacy, integration, etc that need review. Adoption and adjusting business processes need review. In some cases the patchwork of regulatory compliance for your company needs review.
The social technologies are new and have approached us in our rear view mirror quite quickly. It would be a safe bet that most CIOs didn’t minor in sociology as they took their college courses. Yet here we are. There is now a significant and time sensitive dose of sociology in IT.
very good insight. CIOs need to know “who” to deploy IT even MORE importantly than “how”. Effectively deploying a companies IT resources requires knowing the social context of how the IT will be utilized; this is true for both inter-company activities and how customers/consumers will utilize the IT.
Haven’t pre-requisite skill sets changed in the last half dozen years! While knowing the business audience has always been a critical success factor, now the emphasis on that audience is all that more important as you point out. I believe this is all good as it places the focus on where it should be (people) as opposed to technology.