Yooplus

In this rough, harsh April 2009, within the companies a new department is emerging that deals proactively with that backbone of relations and performances that’s called the Internet. We’ll call it IP Department: it’ s changing the adoption rates and ways of technologies, moving the relative investments and redesigning the borders of corporate knowledge by making them fluid. And not just that: the borders of the companies themselves.

The most remarkable fact about it is that this department is not present in organization charts, and it simply does not appear in the usual audits (organizational, administrative). It’s fast, it’s fluid: so much that it’s ineffable. It’s a wave without hours and offices, not a team: it does not issue PowerPoint presentations, does not summon meetings, does not launch projects or schedule releases. Most of all, its members are everywhere within the company.

But who are, then, the members of this IP Department? They’re “regular” people who, independently from their corporate skills and roles, informally build personal informatic infrastructures, in order to satisfy needs and explore desires. They’re bricoleurs, according to the meaning - here recontextualized - of the work of François Jacob, or individuals who operate

(…) not as an engineer but as a bricoleur, who doesn’t know exactly what he’ll produce, but who will recover everything that he finds around, the weirdest and most diverse things.

These bricoleus aren’t experts of technologies nor engineers, they’re people who had the chance of creating informal IT infrastructures thanks to the tools available online. Free, reliable tools, probably OpenSource.
Bricoleurs who - together - show their companies the best (most modern?) paths of construction of relations and performances of what usually survives only as slag concretion (what about the corporate use of e-mail? or GANTTs on Microsoft Project?)

But then, will the IT Department be run over by this wave, as we called it? On the contrary: today it meets an interesting, vital challenge if there ever was one: finding a bio-balance with this vital but fuzzy force, in order to produce an manage the “things” companies need.

IT has the chance to conquer a new life, but in order to do that, it must get on the surfboard.

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Please notice: This post is the remix of two posts previously published on my blog: Enterprise 2.0: flash and bricolage, and The IP Department (Vita Nova)