Companies have always had to deal with change. In the past, by and large, change was predictable. Nowadays, change has become not only more rapid, but also more complex and ubiquitous. The Internet, Web 2.0 and the whole cluster of technologies that depend upon and enhance the Internet, brought about not just new products and services, but also new industries, new competitors, new ways to interact, and new business models.

Why is the Internet causing so much change? The e-mail is not that much different from a memo; an electronic invoice resembles its paper predecessor; and intranets look similar to the enterprise resource planning systems. The Economist compares the Internet to a chameleon:

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I attended the Mashup Summit put on by Colabria last Friday at John Maloney’s largesse. This one-day event had presentations by a variety of mashup vendors such as StrikeIron, Mashery, Kapow, Google, Nexaweb, IBM and Serus. These presentations were great, but after a while it was hard for someone like me (one of the only non-developers in the audience) to tell the difference between some of these mashup technologies. What was more useful was some of the introductory work by John on value networks and how a mashup was a type of value network. The final session run by John and Ann Majchrzak from USC was a discussion involving everyone in the room and was the most interesting session of the day. I wish they had cut back on some of the vendor presentations and started this most interesting discussion two hours earlier (right after lunch).

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Product Management tools were originally meant for professionals. The first tools I learned about in the 70’s and 80’s were mainframe-based with names like Scitor and Primavera. These tools were mostly focused on resources and scheduling for projects, and had the ability to support large, complex and even multiple projects. What was interesting about these mainframe-based tools was that you could access them from any terminal connected to the mainframe. There was one project plan, and usually only one version of project documents stored in the project space. We used “Profs” for e-mail and notifications of changes in project status. However, even though these tools consolidated project objects, they were complex and often required not only a professional project manager to run the project, but the project team often needed a week or more of training.

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