Ben Booth, in a CIO job share as global CTO at research giant Ipsos MORI, welcomes super-users. "I aim to encourage innovation and keep the dead hand of bureaucracy off it," he explains. "Inevitably, there are people who will try out consumer technology and that can be quite interesting from the point of view of getting to understand what the applications are."
In Booth's opinion, the super-user can be useful in identifying new forms of customer interaction. "In a business like market research we have to look at IT in our own organisation but also look at what clients and people responding to a survey may be interested in. We have several different means of working with super-users. There is an online innovation forum where people who have ideas, usually targeted at specific problems, can contribute to looking at new technology. A lot of the way we work is informal, so people will experiment with things and then talk to people in various areas of IT."
However, he says super-users often act in the mistaken belief that they are saving the company money. "Consumer technology has a lot to offer but there is also some rubbish that is not appropriate in a business environment and the challenge is to ensure what we have is industry strength."
Some CIOs are bringing Web 2.0 super-users back under the wing of the corporate IT infrastructure by implementing enterprise-centric solutions.
Research company Forrester surveyed both sponsored use and unsponsored, employee-driven use of Web 2.0 and found that CIOs were strongly focused on enterprise-sponsored technology use.
According to Forrester, most firms interviewed cited integration between both individual Web 2.0 solutions and overall infrastructure as major concerns. CIOs reported a strong desire to purchase Web 2.0 technologies as a suite, as well as a need to purchase the suites from large, incumbent software vendors.
Group Efforts
If this sounds like a return to the traditional CIO preference for the monolithic system, stifling the creativity of super-users en route, it need not be. In fact, enterprise Web 2.0 systems can be used to identify and bring together the super-users who are increasingly recognised as an important part of the intellectual capital of the enterprise.
Charles Armstrong, CEO of Trampoline Systems, which analyses social behaviour within enterprise 2.0 systems, says, "Companies are beginning to support emergent collaboration and communities and, rather than having a formal structure and chain of command, they are letting people who share the same work focus create new pieces of network.
"In the last 10 years, the whole business information movement has been based on fact-based real-time financial data," Armstrong says. "We are at the beginning of a parallel phenomenon around human organisation. Strategic leaders need to have fact-based information about who are the leaders. There has been no real information about this in the past."
As businesses start experimenting with blogs and wikis, only a small proportion of the workforce use them, he adds.
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