Speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today, Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee hit upon an important point that I think partly explains why IT departments have yet to adopt Web 2.0 technologies on a wide scale: people power. 

McAfee correctly noted that in a Web 2.0 world, the power to create and manage content is transferred from traditional information gatekeepers to the users of that information. For IT departments, this means giving up a large measure of control, allowing employees to shape and develop their online experiences organically. 

This means things could get messy. Very messy. Orderly taxonomy trees are nowhere to be found. Information is edited and tagged and linked and organized in numerous ways by numerous users at numerous times. 

IT departments need to give employees the tools to collaborate — blogs, wikis, etc. — and then, as McAfee said, “get out of the way.” There is no way to accurately predict how people are going to use Web 2.0 technologies, so there is no point in imposing an IT structure upon them. 

And I think this is a scary proposition to most IT professionals. Maybe I’m wrong, and I hardly think that Web 2.0 is going to make IT departments obsolete, but I wonder if some CIOs might be asking themselves, “If users can easily develop and manage their own online tools and communities, what’s left for us to do?”