Ninjas for the noughties



At the turn of the millennium, both the IT industry and corporate IT departments were suffering a major credibility problem. The old perception of IT as a bunch of socially retarded propeller-heads endured in many organisations, and was compounded by a view that those running IT did little except talk twaddle, cause them headaches and cost them money. Firms had been forced to spend vast sums on ‘Y2K compliance’ and the over-hyped dotcom sector was on the verge of crashing.

Businesses began replacing the old guard of technically-focused IT directors with business-savvy CIOs whose goal was to bring unruly IT under control through rigorous risk, cost and contract management.

Soon gone were the frivolous investments in unproven technologies and the talk of web revolution. Then the attacks of September 11th 2001 brought the issue of corporate security to the fore, which compounded IT’s risk-aversion and in many cases fuelled excessive caution about allowing access to - or through - the web.

Yet consumer technology continued to advance apace -  with costs plummeting and functionality increasing all the time. Low-cost ‘always on’ broadband began to replace slow home dial-up connections to the web. Home PCs began to outstrip the capabilities of the kit people used at work. The ways we interacted with information online were more intuitive and efficient than our curse-inducing company systems. As editor of a monthly business and technology magazine, I could organise my workload better, do my research quicker and keep in touch with staff and contacts more effectively from home, yet corporate policies on remote working meant I had to endure three hours’ commuting across London most days to work on systems that served only to hinder my productivity.

It was the spur that led me to leave in 2001 for the life of a freelance.

In the years that followed it became increasingly apparent to those of us paying any interest that the dotcom crash hadn’t been, as the sceptics taunted, proof that the web was not going to change anything. In fact, the crash was a clear-out of the inept and opportunistic, leaving stronger players like Google, Amazon and eBay who had forged fresh ways of doing business in an open, global, networked era . It also cleared the ground for a new wave of web Ninjas to build on their successes - and later their services.

The social,collaborative web we’d seen in embryonic form the previous decade was set to explode - first with blogs and wikis, then later a raft of innovative web applications, services and social networks. By 2004 it had a name - Web 2.0, and the rest, as they say, is recent history. Around the middle of the decade, corporate IT departments, often prodded by users, began to wake up to the fact something was happening. Many began talking in earnest about their ‘transformation programmes’ designed to gain ‘agility for the future’. But the pace of change has been glacial among most traditional businesses when compared to the nimble web Ninjas who are writing the rules of the new era.

And as we end the noughties with our netbooks and smartphones, tweeting as the economy teeters, I enter my fifth decade of technological progress with a frisson of excitement. If my 40 years on this planet have taught me anything, it’s that where pioneering geeks go one decade, everyone else follows a decade later. The 2010s could well shape up to be ten years the web shows us its true potential to transform the business and social landscape in fundamental ways.