Erik Keller: Resistance to the Web's new realm is futile

“Trouble, oh we got trouble, right here in River City! With a capital “T” that rhymes with “P”and that stands for Pool!”

—Lyrics from The Music Man

As con-man Harold Hill told anyone who would listen, the introduction of a pool table to the quiet town of River City was a calamity of unheralded proportions.

Many IT groups are shouting the same refrain as a flood of new albeit consumer-oriented technologies are making their way into manufacturing companies and groups.

Let me tell you a little secret: Get in front of this phenomenon before you fall way behind it.

Today manufacturing companies have a huge selection of alternative—and inexpensive—Web-based applications and platforms to choose from, ranging from Facebook to Second Life to Amazon Web Services to email provider Zimbra—which was recently purchased by Yahoo!

What all of these technologies have in common is a start-up capital cost that approaches a good lunch for a small team, and a time to implementation similar in scope.

And while IT groups are trying to stop companies from using such technologies, there are lots of pretty simple ways to get around even the most sophisticated security programs and firewalls. So if someone in your company wants to use any of these things, trust me they will.

In many ways the new realm of Web-based platforms and applications reminds me of what happened during the 1980s with the advent of minicomputers and PCs. Operational groups within companies got tired of waiting for centralized IT groups to deliver solutions in a timely and cost-effective fashion, so small manufacturing groups, office workers, and others went out and purchased self-contained solutions.

During this time they delivered a tremendous amount of value and loyalty. Ironically, corporations have spent the last 15 years consolidating many of these systems under the guise of enterprise resources planning or customer relationship management to gain better centralized data access.

Now we are about to start the cycle all over again, which is exactly why corporations have a unique opportunity to get ahead of the curve and accept the use of the technology rather than stick their respective heads in the sand about its actual existence.

Companies should attempt to get ahead of the proliferation curve by recommending support of a limited number of technologies, while keeping an eye out for new ones.

Don't try to force applications or uses on your company, but rather let the technology find its best fit. Your customers may surprise you by coming out with some very innovative applications. Create a companywide blog or wiki to track and highlight successes as well as failures.

This will be hard, and it will require a very agile balancing act between too much control and too much chaos. But I think manufacturing companies are up to this challenge, because they continue to thrive even after “common wisdom” has written this sector off many a time.

Better not to resist: It's just another challenge in the day of a manufacturing company.