Excerpts from a panel on if IT should be an owner or operator of collaborative technologies (middlespace issues) at the Collaborative Technologies Conference.

Clay Shirky: was at CSC last Thursday watching a project manager using Lotus, he asked what she used it for, and she said she only used email. They have a bunch of database apps created a few years ago. Lotus most expensive email platform in the history of IT. When you don't give your employees a vote, you give them a veto. Vetos are more expensive. Anything that requires the employee to have coordination with the IT department or getting the IT department to do something, it will have worse propagation properties. This is how PCs and spreadsheets. Perimeter based defense works great except with two kinds of companies: those with vendors and customers. People use IM and Wikis because those ports aren't blocked. How much can an employee do on their own and be able to collaborate with third parties determines that technology will trend away from IT.

Melanie Turek: What's happening now is IT taking control of things that are entering into the enterprise from the bottom up. But will they step up to the plate and adapt.

Michael Sampson: With email, we had departmental solutions until SMTP allowed enterprise wide productivity. Today I can't sit in a Sharepoint interface, you can't in a Lotus interface and you can't in a Socialtext interface and all work together. Those standards simply aren't there yet.

Someone from the audience from McKinsey says the question is the wrong framing, you need to get groups together first, then decide how to support them. Melanie Turek responds by saying not everyone wants to collaborate, how do we incent them to change is the question, less what technology to apply.

Clay Shirky: Users will find the tools that fit their practices. Employees know what they are doing, sticking with email despite the problems until something better comes along.