One of the major roles of any IT department is the safekeeping of an organization’s information. Some local examples: When we needed documentation from an intern program from five years in the past, we were able to retrieve it, when files or the contents of files are inadvertently deleted, we have been able to recover them. For most Web 2.0 systems this might not have been the case. If something is deleted, it’s gone, no second chances, no safety net. From the IT perspective the issue is that a month after something is deleted users have the expectation that there is a pretty good chance that IT can get things back. If IT can’t, it’s IT’s fault, even if the information was stored on the web, not locally, without IT’s knowledge and outside of IT’s control.

There are also many issues that aren’t directly related to education, but some are indirectly. Things like trade secrets and intellectual property rights. If you want to scare yourself, read the Terms of Service that goes along with Google Apps (and gmail) the way an attorney would. The way it reads to me if you use their online applications the items you create (document, emails, etc.) are as much theirs as yours. They can be searched, indexed, copied, redistributed, all without your knowledge or permission. This may be OK for an individual, but for most businesses this is very dangerous. Once again, authorization and policy compliance issues are normally the responsibility of the IT department, even if users are bypassing them and using web based applications.

As Web 2.0 matures beyond the current “consumer” grade applications and evolves into more “business” grade systems this will all change. This is much like the conflict that occurred in the 1980’s regarding PC’s in business. IT departments were staunchly against the introduction of PC’s into businesses for many of the same reasons that are sited about Web 2.0 now: lack of recoverability, insufficient security, etc. Many people may look back and say, “see PC’s are everywhere, the PC advocates were right and the old guard of IT lost.” Actually what happened was the PC matured to where it can be recoverable and secure so it met IT’s standards and was accepted.