Paging Dr Hekyll and Mr Jive

You might argue that masonry is the least important part of a housing project -- the real secret to a nice house is the design and the decor. And you might be right. It can then be exceedingly frustrating when your new house begins to run months behind schedule because the bricklayer didn't show up, or the electrician got the wiring wrong, or...Why, you wonder -- after all you invested a great deal of time and money in the more valuable parts of the project, why is the grunt work dragging you down?

Much the same often happens in many Web 2.0 projects which start with pious declarations that IT is the least important part of what is being done, that the project is really about social or cultural change, and that the project team is going to spend 90% of its time on these and 10% or less on technology. It's all fine and dandy, and good for resounding applause in meetings, but when it comes to the rub, you start hearing about IT delays holding the project up, you begin to see little bugs on screens, and you begin to run more regularly into exasperated social media geeks shaking their head ruefully.

None of this is to argue for the indispensability of IT but to ask social media geeks what they were thinking when they planned to spend 10% of their time on IT? The number makes little sense -- it should be 0% (or over 50%; the latter makes it a different order of work entirely and social media types would do well to bow out of such engagements). Organizational realities makes 0% unlikely in many cases but that is the only meaningful number.

Look at it this way. Typical social media projects (think collaboration, for instance) are not IT projects at all and should not be tracked as part of an organization's IT portfolio. Your IT team should not be looking over your shoulder when you use Twitter, your IT team should not be asked to vet your decision to use Facebook, your IT team should be unconcerned if you start a wiki, your IT team should refuse to come to the meeting if you are discussing a new blog, and your IT team should glance pitifully at you if you broach the subject of a social network. Plenty of other folks in the organization should take a deep interest in each of these ideas of yours but not IT. And you should never, ever ask your IT team to build tools to support such services.

It is time to start thinking about what is and what isn't IT and social media is most likely not IT. At all.

If you plan for the ideal, you might achieve an approximation of it.

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Thus ends a bitter triptych. Parts 1 and 2 are here.