Grounded In Reality

InformationWeek wrote an interesting article this week about the latest generation of college grads entering the workforce and what technology they expect to be made available while on the job.

I can vouch that there have been times I was not allowed to access technology  necessary for me to be fully capable of doing my job…with a Google Toolbar being the simpliest of things.

IDC research numbers show(ing) that 45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis.

What’s interesting about that, according to Susan Feldman, VP of content technologies at IDC, is that the study also showed that IT managers and executives largely didn’t know any of this was going on.

It is understandable that a company would have progam downloading banned from users, but there should be a policy in place for requesting access to relevant sites/downloads.

She (Susan Feldman) told InformationWeek that with Web 2.0 technologies increasingly becoming part of people’s social lives, they will demand that it be part of their work lives, as well. And a lot of companies may have this new technology inside their firewalls that they simply don’t know about.

“We’ll have to deal with the reality of people coming in and using tools that aren’t in the firewall,” said De Beer. “Web 2.0 empowers users beyond creating content. It’s about how we interact. For the next generation, it will be about mass collaboration, using social networking.”

In my opinion, things will morph.  Just as companies had to create ‘blogging policies,’ they will also have to create other Web 2.0 poilicies. 

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.