What should IT’s role be in deploying a Web Office solution?

Does IT have a role in determining taxonomies and specifying works flows?

These are the questions that Dennis D. McDonald raised in a conversation I had with him this morning. Dennis is an IT management consultant, and he runs an interesting blog called ALL KIND FOOD*.

These are actually really important questions as companies beginning to implement enterprise blogs, enterprise Wikis and other Web Office technology.

I believe the answer is fairly simple. Internal IT departments should provide the platform, but should not determine how people work with the information.

Email provides a good example. IT should make my email work, but IT shouldn’t let tell me what to write about in my emails, and nor should they tell me who to write to.

Similarly, within an organization, this means that IT departments should tell the business users what types of blogs they are going to use. Nor should IT departments force the business users to adopt specific taxonomies.

What does this mean? For enterprise blogging needs to provide a platform that gives business users the ability to quickly define types of blogs. Today, a blog type is a combination of the templates that make up the blog, the types of blog roll links within the blog, the blog CSS and the information and the plug-ins that are used by the blog. In the future, a blog type will probably also include a list of widgets that can be dropped into posts by users.

Dennis asked me “What if business users want to use 3 different types of blogging tools? One wants to use WordPress, another MovableType. Doesn’t IT have a legitimate concern that all these systems mean multiple upgrades, multiple interfaces, even multiple contracts?”

In a properly built Service Orientated Architecture environment, this shouldn’t be much of a problem.

It’s a great question, however, because it points to an important understanding of what Web Office is. Web Office is a platform that knowledge workers (or Innovation Creators) use to deploy applications that allow them to efficiently communicate with a large audience.

The point of Web Office is that there will be many types of server tools. We need to develop standards to make sure they work together efficiently, but there is nothing that is going to stop the torrent.

Dennis D. McDonald and Jeremiah Owyang have written a very interesting white paper on this topic called Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0″ Tools. It’s worth checking out.