JP Rangaswami is the CIO and Chief Scientist at British Telecom
Background:
[These are my quick notes, complete with (what I hope is no more than) the occasional typo and grammatical error. Please excuse those. Thanks!
From time to time, I’ll insert my own editorial comments – exercising the prerogatives of the blogger. I’ll show those in brackets. ]
Notes:
- What’s the challenge for the next seven years?
- The loss of control
- The organization has to design for a loss of control
- IT is facing loss of control too. The age of the locked down desktop is ending. Now users can bring their own tools to the office.
- It’s easy to admit we’ve lost control of the device – much harder to face the implications of losing control of the data.
- The act of trying to restrict/control something that is meant to be abundant results in an equal and greater effort to restore abundance. E.g., wikileaks.
- Once info is made digital, it will leak.
- The loss of the understanding of where the boundaries of the enterprise are
- Consider what percentagge of emails actually leave your organization
- Everything that happens inside the organization is cost – to raise revenue, you need to interact outside the organization
- In this context, why do we spend so much time and money to keep information inside?
The loss of of intelligence
- Are these tools making us dumb?
- Are the tools making organizations dumb? Are we providing tools that prevent true comprehension? E.g., PowerPoint anyone?
- Does an individual lose personal skills while gaining the skills of the collective?
- How do we design for collective expertise?
- The loss of control
Above and Beyond KM 
I was at JP's keynote and panel session. He made some great points that make us think and ponder on where we are on this curve w.r.t. our own organizations. Many of the other presentations at the show were in the category of – either you are on board or not (w.r.t. social). I would think any decent size organization would need some kind of an on ramp, that keeps a handshake with the way things are today, but ultimately leads to next gen social collaboration medium. This is needed because there are different types of users on the adoption curve, yet each has a well defined function and role in the organization and cannot be left out. Put it another way, what I am saying is that you cannot go from one end of the spectrum of control and locked down to completely open all of a sudden. Even if you build or deploy an 'open' social collaboration system, they'll be plenty of instances where things will need to be locked down. That's just the nature of how enterprises conduct business. The good news is that systems and applications can be put in place to recognize this key aspect and organizations can still achieve the promise of crowd sourcing via social media and social collaboration tools.-Puneet Gupta