Buzz roundtable: Buzz, 09/27/99

Buzz

Network World Fusion, 09/27/99

Let's get to the last question about controlling the buzz within the enterprise. We've talked about a lot of technologies that are generating a lot of buzz. It seems the buzz itself can make things tough on network managers, given upper management hears about these technologies and likely wants to implement them tomorrow. What can users to do control the buzz within their own organizations?

Nolle: You should go to the mailroom and prevent any trade magazine from being delivered to anyone with a title higher than director.

Kearns: You have to construct your portal correctly so that the right information is flowing to the decision makers.

Kobielus: And get them to stop watching the evening news and reading the general circulation newspapers, too.

Nolle: Unfortunately I agree with you and I don't think there's any answer to it. The problem today is really not so much buzz as it is the lack of a credible mechanism for building any real consensus on anything. We're always going to have a lot of issues and a lot of debate. Those are good things. What's bad is we don't have any mechanism for resolving those issues or that debate in favor of a position that is validated broadly in the marketplace.

Kobielus: Then it comes down to the need for a CIO or that kind of a person within an organization whose fundamental job is to survey the environment of technologies being buzzed about and explain to the non-technical and technical people how these issues fit into the company's broad strategic plan. That person may not be able to give a lot of substance in all of these areas, or to really lay out a clear battle plan for addressing those areas. But at least this person has a mental model that he or she can share with the rest of the company, saying, "I know what's important on this list and I can tell you what's less important."

Kearns: You cannot posit that every corporation will have a person with the capacity to thoroughly understand every hot new technology that comes along. No one has the time to do that. We don't have the time to do that and it's our job, essentially. We all specialize in certain areas. People in corporations are going to be specialized in certain areas. They have to learn to trust opinioned sources and find opinioned sources who are generally speaking in tune with the way they think. Think of it as the same way you read movie reviews or restaurant reviews. You find a restaurant reviewer who is somewhat attuned to your taste and you believe him. Same thing with movie reviewers.

Nolle: Sure, but here's an information industry which we are all a part of which has not been right about one major trend in the whole decade of the 90s. I would say we're sending our readers to the wrong restaurant in some respects.

Kobielus: But you get to the point where you validate a source, an authority, and you stick with that person, provisionally, conditionally, and that person filters the buzz until such time as that person's filters prove to be dysfunctional. Then you find another source of expertise.

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