Martin Veitch

Times of sudden change can create bouts of unusual behaviour, whether we look at the examples of American GIs and English girls in the Second World War, the decadence of the Weimar Republic, or the eruption of public mourning at the demise of the People’s Princess.

So it should have come as no surprise that the dot-com mania of – can you believe it? – a decade ago, produced an about-turn in attitude towards risk at even the largest organisations. There was some weird eve-of-millennium thinking at the zenith of the first internet business generation, with even grey eminences publicly questioning business tenets that had held fast for decades before.

The advent of Web 2.0 technologies brings forth another period of turbulence. Few expect the pots of gold promised – although rarely delivered – by Web 1.0, but there is value to be had from change. The question managers will ask themselves this time around must be whether to repeat the laissez-faire attitude of last time around or to don belt and braces and just say no.

The newer technologies promise public exposure in the form of blogs, knowledge management through social software, usability through mashups and much else.

Lockdown offers risk limitation, the comfort of familiarity and the sense that order has been maintained.

Tony Blair might be gone but a Third Way may yet be enticing when it comes to balancing the risks and rewards that come with these new technologies.

In Web 1.0, the temptation that many firms succumbed to was throwing baby out with bathwater and allowing youth to have its way. The result was speed to market but at a price: public web sites that looked like a child’s scrawl on a dog’s dinner; speculative investments on dot-com ventures that came to nought; mass-mailing lists that annoyed customers and partners; changes to infrastructure that were quickly revoked.

The hangover was long and sickly. The internet became a swear word like Y2K: it was all hype and no knickers, and business had been sold down the river by the geeks. Again.

The solution this time round with Web 2.0 must be to find harmony between management probity and the potential of the smart people of the IT department.

Instead of casting caution to the winds and letting a thousand flowers bloom, projects that lean on the new thinking will have to be reined in with control procedures. At least one company I met recently has the right idea. It has taken 10 of its 80 IT staff away from everyday roles and asked them to work on using new technologies to reshape the way the organisation’s knowledge workers operate. At the end of the three-month trial, this work will be assessed and a traffic-light system will approve, stop or award a period of longer examination to their projects.

A halfway house perhaps, but a sensible move nonetheless.