The possibilities of the Internet never stops to amaze me. There is a real shift in the way we people interact and get together nowadays. As many of you know I am an avid internet user and I follow around 50 blogs or so using the RSS feature in Safari. Mainly I read blogs in three categories: personal/LGBT-blogs, Mac-related blogs and finally enterprise technology blogs. For a year or so I have been following the CTO Blog. One of the people who reguarly writes there is their Global CTO Andy Mulholland and I have read his posts with great interest and commented on a few of them. One of the posts I commented: Debunking the Myths of Long Tail and so much more!
One day I got an email from him where he asked if I would like to meet him when he was visiting Sweden later on. Well, yesterday we met and had a rather intense session for two and half hours straight. It was really interesting to listen to the experience of a CTO of a major corporation both from their internal experiences but also from some of their customers. The main focus of the discussion was around people and how we can support our very human desire to collaborate and communicate. As a self-confessed IT-visionary I of course want utilize the most of the possibilities out there and create the truly integrated enterprise platform. On the other hand we are more and more challenged by easy-to-use tools that people find on the internet in the Web 2.0 era. Tools like Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare and many others. That means that a lot of people find the functionalities that the enterprise IT-departments offer rather cumbersome, limited and old-fashioned.
Anyway, I left the meeting completely exhausted and had a lot to think about.