The Enterprise Web 2.0 Generation has arrived!

In an earlier blog post I wrote about why SaaS will become the natural choice for organizations.
I wrote

However what ensures the longevity of SaaS is the next group of CIO's who are in college or have recently joined the workforce. This crop will see Web 2.0 as a totally natural way of doing business as its what they do in their personal lives.
Storing files and documents, in Google, in Microsoft Live, social networking, wikis all are ingrained in this new generation and SaaS will become the obvious choice.

It appears the enterprise world is beginning to realize this.
An article by Heather Havenstein in ComputerWorld published today looks at how "Companies wrestle with tech demands of younger workers".

Chris Scalet, senior vice president and CIO of Merck & Co was quoted

Scalet, senior vice president and CIO of Merck & Co., noticed that as his daughter studied, she simultaneously listened to her iPod, sent text messages and browsed through pages of the Facebook social network.

"How she will work in the future will be very different from how we work today," Scalet said. "She is going to expect [collaboration] tools ... to be able to work. What scared me is that we don't think that way today as corporations. We think as baby boomers [about] this very traditional, structured, formal [work environment]."

Heather also states that IT executives are beginning to plan for the 80 Million children of baby boomers entering the workforce.

In the November 15,2007 Edition of CIO Magazine , editor Elana Varon interviews Gary Hamel,

Gary states that

If you're a CIO, you need to spend a lot of time out on the fringes of the Web because that's where the innovation is taking place. You need to spend a lot of time with people under 25 years old

These current trends all vindicate the work practices (which are contrary to traditional enterprise policies) I have in place with my development teams. I place no restrictions on Social Networking, IMing, private emailing, reading and writing blogs and wikis for my staff, in fact they are strongly encouraged. There are multiple benefits to organizations with these types of practices.

1. We don't really have set hours for working, and if an urgent customer issue,request or deadline arises in the middle of the night, our staff are easily contactable via these mechanisms and collaboration at midnight is often a common thing, our customers are often surprised at how often we deliver overnight. Cell phones are very seldom used in these situations apart from reading emails.
2. Often new product and usage ideas are generated by the usage of Social Computing tools at work and at home
3. Collaboration is taken to a new level, any "productivity loss" from social computing is more than made up by the improvements in communications and the reduction of miscommunication.
4. New staff members feel more comfortable contributing ideas and questions, as they are in an environment very similar to their "college social network".

Once again I will say:
This Web 2.0 generation will provide the tech leaders of the near future,the Cloud is here to stay.

Why SaaS will become the preferred solution over On Premise.

I just answered a linkedin question about what will become the predominant solution SaaS or On Premise. I thought it worth posting about.

Firstly lets have a look at why some organizations may have a natural resistance towards SaaS. An Article in CIO magazine lists a number of these reasons which I summarize here.

1. Service levels cannot be guaranteed by SaaS vendor
2. Lack of configurability
3. Sharing functionality with hundreds of potential competitors
4. Elimination of CIO role

I will add a couple more here

1. Hosting data outside of firewall.
2. Loss of control due to business units running "rogue" IT projects using SaaS.

Lets take a look at why these 'inhibitors' become non-issues for SaaS.

1. Firstly SaaS Service levels. Gone are the days where a startup SaaS vendor will try to host their own service. This is not a core competency, as such SaaS vendors follow their own value proposition ie find an expert to handle Hosting and service levels. Companies such as Rackspace and Opsource will handle this side of the business with guaranteed up times.
2. Lack of configurability. SaaS obviously enables you to implement a system which can be used in a very short amount of time, bypassing on premise challenges such as server provisioning and software installation. However SaaS does not mean the end of configuration. Salesforce.com as an example provides a very flexibility platform for building your own custom objects and UI, as do many other vendors. This enables you to model the 20% of your business process which is unique to you.
3. Sharing functionality with other organizations. This works both ways, sure you may have had an idea which the SaaS vendor has taken and made available to others. But this means you too will benefit from other organization's ideas. Furthermore the uniqueness of your business process is part of the configuration model mentioned in item 2 above, it is not part of the standard functionality of the multi-tenant single instance.
4. The CIO role will not be eliminated. In fact I see it going the other way, where it becomes even more a strategic organizational role. The CIO must make decisions on what is SaaS and what is on premise, they also need to determine how these systems integrate and how information is conveyed within the organization.
5. Data outside of the firewall. This continues to be a major topic in the news. But as the trend of utilizing data center experts such as Opsource and Rackspace increases then the risk continues to reduce, as these companies' entire success hinges on security and reliability.
6. Rogue Projects. Many time business units within an organization will look to a SaaS solution as they have been told by IT that their needs cannot be serviced in a timely manner internally. As SaaS becomes more widely accepted and recognized by Internal IT not as a threat but as an asset then SaaS projects will not be seen as rogue projects but rather an IT recommended solution. This will enable CIOs to adopt SaaS in a more structured and integrated approach.

The current generation of CIOs may have these inhibitions towards SaaS and will take time for these 'fears' to be overcome.

However what ensures the longevity of SaaS is the next group of CIO's who are in college or have recently joined the workforce. This crop will see Web 2.0 as a totally natural way of doing business as its what they do in their personal lives.
Storing files and documents, in Google, in Microsoft Live, social networking, wikis all are ingrained in this new generation and SaaS will become the obvious choice.