[JP Rangaswami on web 2.0, social networking + business]

I've just been watching Dan Farber (ZDNet editor-in-chief) interview JP Rangaswami. Rangaswarmi talks about BT and the role of new media and open source. Some interesting quotes:

"In fact if you look at what I’m doing with Facebook, what I’m really achieving, what any of us who wants to use it in an enterprise environment achieves, is to say that you’ve taken what happened at the water cooler or at the coffee shop and made it persistent, made it shareable, made it teachable, made it learnable. That’s a huge win because we’ve spent years talking about the value of the water cooler conversations, of the coffee shops, of the more amorphous softer discussions. Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision making migrates horizontally, laterally through an organization, rather than through the published hierarchies, how people really work, and what people do as part of that work."

and, BT is no longer simply a telecoms company but (here's a mouthful):

"a platform based software driven networked IT services company."

Interestingly Dan Farber asks:

"Now as part of that environment that you’re talking about, the software as a service and exposing the assets to the customer and letting them build upon it, obviously that might deal to some extent with the web 2.0 type technologies, how are you investing in those types of approaches?"

and Rangaswami responds:

"Well as you would expect, I don’t think I could have joined a firm that didn’t believe in collaborative tools and techniques and at BT it’s pretty much part of our DNA. Collaboration is right at the heart of what we do, we have very very large internal use of blogs and wikis, we have considerable use of IM techniques. We also have a growing ability for ourselves to be able use various forms of, I mean if you look at facebook, I think we’re probably up to 6000 people just on the visible BT."

But does social media always work for business? No, not in any generic way, businesses need to use aspects of social media that work for them, their brand and their ethos. The moral of the story:

"I have not failed, I have found 10,000 ways that do not work."

The video of the talk is here. The transcript here and Dan Faber's blog post here.