Prosumers in Enterprise 2.0? Not yet...
Tuesday: June 5, 2007 6:25 AM
The IT Innovator Don Tapscott suggested a term “Prosumer” to describe the blurring gap between the producer and consumer of a product or service. On the surface, this sounds like an important discovery and it is in the outside world. Clearly, organizations are using social software to drive adoption, marketing, and innovation within their industry. The instantaneous feedback organizations get from the consumers of their product create an environment that is conducive to the most agile of enterprises.
As most people know, we made our 15 minutes of fame on the concepts of enterprise metadata. The basic concepts of asset accounting and inventory management of the IT area produce the need for developing enterprise metadata strategies. We understood that the producer of a reusable asset will also consume those assets. The producer of data definitions will be a consumer of other organizations data definitions.
That being said, I struggle with the merging of the producer and consumer communities due the mentality difference. Is it possible that a produce information or content while at the same time consuming it? Perhaps, but we still look at the functions differently. The business processes around production are very different than those built for consumption. We measure and judge producers by the amount and quality of information while the consumers are judged by the amount of usage or reuse. We market to them differently and communicate with them differently. Promsumers? Perhaps in the future, but the divide is still wide within the enterprise. The fact is that the more information the producers create the more will be used by the consumer. Of course, the opposite is also true. The more information is consumed the more information is produced. Not a bad business to be in...
The IT Innovator Don Tapscott suggested a term “Prosumer” to describe the blurring gap between the producer and consumer of a product or service. On the surface, this sounds like an important discovery and it is in the outside world. Clearly, organizations are using social software to drive adoption, marketing, and innovation within their industry. The instantaneous feedback organizations get from the consumers of their product create an environment that is conducive to the most agile of enterprises.
As most people know, we made our 15 minutes of fame on the concepts of enterprise metadata. The basic concepts of asset accounting and inventory management of the IT area produce the need for developing enterprise metadata strategies. We understood that the producer of a reusable asset will also consume those assets. The producer of data definitions will be a consumer of other organizations data definitions.
That being said, I struggle with the merging of the producer and consumer communities due the mentality difference. Is it possible that a produce information or content while at the same time consuming it? Perhaps, but we still look at the functions differently. The business processes around production are very different than those built for consumption. We measure and judge producers by the amount and quality of information while the consumers are judged by the amount of usage or reuse. We market to them differently and communicate with them differently. Promsumers? Perhaps in the future, but the divide is still wide within the enterprise. The fact is that the more information the producers create the more will be used by the consumer. Of course, the opposite is also true. The more information is consumed the more information is produced. Not a bad business to be in...
