IDF Live: Is Social Media a Friend or Foe of IT?

39:20 | Jason Lopez | Sep 19th, 2007 4:35pm |

Tom Foremski, editor of Silicon Valley Watcher, led a panel discussion on Day 1 of the Fall Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The panel dealt directly with the friction that often arises between the burgeoning social media forces in the enterprise and the IT groups that find themselves in opposition to the kinds of needs created by those newer social networks.

The panel in this podcast includes Peter Kaminski, CTO of Socialtext, Jackie Medecki, attorney for social media and marketing at Intel, Jeff Moriarty, a social media/Web 2.0 design engineer at Intel, John Miner, an IT methodologist at Intel, and Eleanor Wynn, a social technology architect at Intel

It’s IT’s stereotypical response (”No”) to questions about setting up blogs and wikis, that prompts the debate. But as John Miner points out, most large companies inherently already have blogs and wikis — they just don’t realize it. This, he says, is because they tend to grow organically inside of large IT structures. But the fact is that the candor and conversation that make up the substance of blogs and wikis do tend to threaten some of the structures of the enterprise — especially when it comes to ...