Power to the People . . . Definitely . . .

I recently read a post on InformationWeek speaking to the power users currently have. View that blog post by J. Nicholas Hoover here. I posted a comment . . . But here is the meat of it.

A look at the modern desktop shows that the modern worker has the power to personalize. They have their chat windows up, desktops laid out as they wish, gadgets selected and downloaded, favorite sites bookmarked, and internet homepages set for their browsers. It would be hard to find identical desktops.

Extending that to the Web 2.0 era, we find that the personalized start pages that fell out of favor with the 'bubble burst' are now back and more powerful. Web 2.0 start-ups like NetVibes are giving the power to the people on this front.

The latest trend is coming with the enterprise adoption of social networking tools in the workplace. See our post from last month on Intel's social networking roll out here. Social networking decentralizes power on many levels.

Chris Anderson, Wired editor-in-chief speaking at Cisco's analyst conference is spot on: "One size does not fit all. You cannot serve all the interests of all the employees with one policy." From a look at the modern workplace computer, it seems for the most part the modern IT department implicitly agrees. We will see how that changes.