The major obstacle to the adoption of social computing

Having spent a good half day teaching approaches to social computing, the biggest obstacle to adoption is not gaining participation, but the IT department trying to over-constrain the system to retain control of an environment which by its very nature needs to be a evolutionary. They want to choose one application when multiple changing applications in different combinations are more effective. Worst still, fitting all the social computing requirements into one enterprise wide purchase. Its a cycle really: remember all the problems to shift IT departments away from build it yourself to enterprise wide application software? It took years. Now they are locked into that approach, unable to see that the paradigm has shifting again. Increasing costs, reducing interaction, damaging corporate effectiveness; shielding themselves behind a cloak of security and audit train that does not bear scrutiny.