At the same time, a recent InformationWeek survey of IT departments are showing considerably wariness for doing the same thing inside the firewall with employees, with over half being either skeptical or wary of the utility of Web 2.0 apps in the enterprise. The biggest concerns: Security, little expertise with Web 2.0 products, integration issues, and unclear ROI top the list. In other words, the group inside most organizations that's most familiar with IT and software, is thinking carefully before deploying things like Enterprise 2.0.
This is an interesting contrast, with a growing list of companies cautiously but clearly testing out the Web 2.0 waters with their customers while remaining largely on the fence for its use inside the enterprise. Certainly, many organizations likely believe that consumer facing sites that extensively leverage user generated content, mass participation, and social networking have been proved to work on a large scale by sites like MySpace and YouTube. And that organizations have already purchased and deployed countless IT tools that were already designed support internal business processes, ad hoc collaboration, and information capture and storage.
Another probably contributor to the increasing use of customer-facing Web 2.0 applications by large organizations is simple competitive pressure. This is something that IT departments have only recently started facing in a serious fashion with outsourcing and other budget diversions in the enterprise as business units decide that they can do better by pitting their internal IT suppliers with external ones. Thus, because of industry competition, a company's external products tend to improve faster and be more innovative since the concern over the displacement and dislocation of falling behind one's competitive peers is often pronounced in many industries. Competition is usually much less, and often non-existent, for internal IT products.
lisa templer on 21 Jan 12Mothers' Diet To Blame For Sons' Low Sperm Count? The spotlight has fallen on the growth hormones fed to cattle as a possible explanation for low sperm counts in some men. The research, appearing in Human Reproduction, suggests that a mother's high beef consumption (seven or more beef meals per week) while pregnant could be linked to poor sperm quality in her son. Interestingly, beef consumption by the men themselves was not found to be linked to the quality of their semen. Conducted by researchers from the University of Rochester, study author Shanna H. Swan said this was the first study to examine beef intake and semen quality. Central to the study was the relationship between semen quality and long-term risks from growth hormones and other chemicals in beef. The synthetic growth hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES) was banned in 1979 but other anabolic hormones are still routinely used to raise cattle. The study found that among the men whose mothers were the highest beef eaters, almost 18 percent had sperm counts classified as "sub-fertile". By comparison, sperm concentrations were 24 percent higher for men whose mothers ate less beef. It seems that high beef consumption during pregnancy may alter sperm production in the male fetus in utero. Swan explained that although sperm production occurs in stages throughout a man's life, the most important stage of development for semen quality actually occurs in the womb. While there appears to be a significant link between the lowest sperm counts and mothers who were the highest beef consumers, Swan could not pinpoint hormones as the culprit, saying it could be pesticides or other environmental contaminants behind the effect. "What we're really doing here is raising an issue," said Swan. "The average sperm concentration of the men in our study went down as their mothers' beef intake went up. But this needs to be followed up carefully before we can draw any conclusions." Swan suggests that to gauge the role hormone
