Presenting and the The Shock of the Social

I'll be giving a talk at The Shock of the Old 2007: Shock of the Social event in Oxford later this month, entitled: Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services? In this I am collaborating with my colleague, Brian Kelly, who came up with the original idea. This is in the context of Universities especially. However, this sort of debate has been had before in industry - the 'Software as a Service' concept is certainly not new. But the collaborative and social aspects of Web 2.0 give a new spin to these discussions. For example, I have to give a presentation. Traditionally, I leave this until a few days before, fire up Keynote on the MacBook, spare a thought for the poor unfortunates wrestling with PowerPoint, and churn out a presentation. On the day I'll give the presentation, and hope to spark some discussion. Then, once I have given the presentation, if it went down OK, I might upload it to Slideshare, and then blog about it. Maybe someone will comment and the presentation will continue to provoke/encourage further conversation in the blogosphere.... But wait! Why does the presentation have to start the conversation? Why not start it now, here on this blog? Get a conversation going before the event, create a better informed presentation, carry on the conversation afterwards. So, does Web 2.0 mean the end of in-house development and provision of IT services in universities? If, for example, university staff and students can set up blogs & wikis on any number of hosted services, do they need a local IT department to do this for them anymore? What do you think?