Better, faster, cheaper, safer, and easier to work with

Before the web, it was easy to tell the difference between consumer software and corporate software.

Consumer software came on a floppy disk, stuffed into a plastic sleeve in a rear of a small binder of documentation in impossibly small type. It cost less than a $750, often far less. Sometimes it came in a plastic bag, a 6″ floppy with a Xeroxed page of cryptic instructions.

Corporate software came on a reel of mag tape or a CD. It cost $10,000 and up, often all the way up to $500,000. It came with a site engineer, who would often live with you while you worked the bugs out.

Today the line between consumer and corporate has blurred. Internet protocols enable programs large and small to speak the same language. Old-style monolithic software has given way to assemblies of modular pieces. Apache, an open-source, free program is baked into the innards of IBM Websphere, Oracle, and most of the applications that run the web.

In terms of utility, consumer software applications have lapped their corporate counterparts. Take Facebook.

Facebook started out in February 2004 as an online supplement to the picture book Harvard gives incoming students, faculty, and staff to help them get to know one another. (When I went to college, every liquor store and bar bought a copy of our facebook to check whether students were of legal drinking age.) The following month, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. Two months later, Facebook covered most colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. In the fall of 2005, Facebook opened up to high school students. A year after that, membership was extended to anyone over the age of 13. Today, Facebook’s 90 million members swap information, photos, and news in networks organized by city, workplace, school, or region

Corporations use Facebook extensively. The company tested corporate use with Accenture, Amazon.com, Apple Computer, Electronic Arts, Gap, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, PepsiCo, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Teach For America in 2005. A year ago, Fortune magazine reported that, “Work networks are exploding, with 14,000 at IBM, 10,000 at Ernst & Young, 8,100 at the BBC, and 6,300 at General Electric. The U.S. Army network has 43,000 members.”

Why are corporations using an application built for college kids? Because it’s better than the costly, clunky, proprietary, traditional corporate stuff. A page in Facebook is attractive. Just about everyone who has graduated from college in the past three years already knows how to use it. That in itself is not a great advantage; Facebook is simple to learn. However, it sure beats learning the interface to enterprise software. And I won’t get into the glacial pace of, say, finding something or someone in Lotus Notes.

Corporations have talked about breaking down silo walls, facilitating collaboration, finding friendly ways to interface with customers, locating employees with certain skills, and so on. These all revolve around social networks. The real question is why more corporations don’t use Facebook.

For that matter, why shouldn’t corporations embrace blogs, wikis, tags, and social networking across the board? Free, open-source applications are generally more robust and better designed than pricey, proprietary applications.

This “consumerization” of computer applications injects a big change into the way corporations should look at making decisions about the infrastructure to support learning. The web is the way of the future; you might as well get on the train before it picks up more speed. Instead of the traditional route of laborious analysis and planning, followed by approvals and programming, and eventually a slow roll-out, you can take the stance of do it-try it-fix it. Put it out there; see if it works. Often, you can assemble a prototype web application in a matter of hours. Time is money. Fail early, fail often, end up with winners.

In many cases, our unfamiliarity with the Facebooks of the world is what is holding us back from putting them to work. In my future work in the realm of Learnscape Architecture, I plan to take on the role of translator, interpreting the mysteries of internet culture and sharing stories of improving corporate learning in network environments.