The Future of Enterprise and Web 2.0
From the CTO Forum Team
Stowe Boyd, the director of Microsyntax.org and a web 2.0 evangelist, shares his views on the myths, realities and future of web 2.0 in enterprise:
Q: It is a popular belief that Web 2.0 will have the greatest impact on workplace collaboration. How would you defend or oppose it?
A: My belief is that the key differentiation between the early Web and Web 2.0 is the emergence of sociality, where the individual displaces the group as the basic organising unit, and information flows principally through social relationships.
More than just the buzzword, Web 2.0 is a transformative force that’s propelling enterprises across all industries towards a new way of doing business through user participation, openness, and network effects.
Q: Are enterprises deriving value from Web 2.0 tools? Are they now shifting from using these tools experimentally to adopting them as part of a broader business practice?
A: William Gibson once said, “The future is here already, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
There are a lot of companies - Intel, Cisco, Booz Allen, Sun - that are getting a great deal from Web 2.0 tools, and a bazillion others at the foot of the adoption curve.
Q: How important are these tools in nurturing a competitive edge? What should enterprises do to harness the true potential of Web 2.0?
A: Web 2.0 is not about competitiveness, per se.
Web 2.0 allows companies to organise themselves in different ways, to operate differently, to connect with consumers and marketplaces in newer ways.
So, competitiveness is a secondary benefit. If you are looking for a single quality to help clarify the impact of Web 2.0, consider resilience, since Web 2.0 seems to broaden the company’s ability to respond to challenges.
The way to get going is to start now, based on where you are. Investing in experiments around social media to connect more deeply with customers and partners could be a good start.
Crowd sourcing innovation - drawing on the smarts distributed across the company and outside,in the user community - is another big bang that companies need to be exploring.
And internal micro-streaming (micro-blogging) is an upcoming and likely area for most companies to start looking at.
Q: How should enterprises look at adaptability challenges of Web 2.0?
A: I strongly believe it’s odd that so many companies have historically built up their own IT teams.
One of the first jobs I had after getting my Masters in Computer Science was at a small software consulting firm that had taken over compiling projects of insurance companies that had started decades earlier.
These companies had thought it would be a competitive advantage, in the ‘70s, to develop their own version of COBOL or FORTRAN.
Looking back, we laugh! And it kept a small firm in business, cleaning up the mess that these people created, and moving their programmes to new architectures long after the guys who dreamed that stuff up had retired.
The new craze is for the enterprise to build all this Web 2.0 technology internally because they ‘can’t find anything that meets their requirements’.
That is usually someone who wants to build an empire.
On the other hand, it may be the case that the various bits and pieces that a company wants to use don’t fit well together.
But I still think an external specialist should be brought in to do the integration, rather than building the equivalent team internally.
Q: Is it secure? Web 2.0, like clouds, is seemingly an unsecured place. Is it a myth? Can you defy this myth?
A: I don’t understand this point of people worrying about security while deploying Web 2.0 tools. It can run on physically secure servers behind a company’s firewall, if needed.
I think like true love, even security is overrated. By the same yardstick, even applications in the cloud can be secure.
Q: Also, can you define a path from here? Are collaborative technologies going to be more engaging for the enterprises?
A: Indeed they will. One of the big drivers for Web 2.0 adoption is that people have become used to certain applications in everyday life because they are simple and fun and then want to use them in the context of business.
To the extent that business can loosen up and accept that it’s ok to enjoy using tools, the better off they will be.
Good food not only is nourishing, but tastes good, and the enterprise software world seems to have forgotten that lesson, in general.
The CTO Forum is India’s leading fortnightly magazine for technology decision makers. It promotes the exchange of informed perspectives and insights on trends, management techniques and new IT business strategies, between CIOs and other stakeholders. The CTO Forum is acknowledged as a ‘trusted source’ of knowledge for top management responsible for balancing the demands on technology for ‘growth and governance’.
* * *
Stay Informed With ISR News Feeds and Email Alerts Here:
The Publisher gives permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author, The CTO Forum and to Information-Security-Resources.com
Filed under: Breach, CTO Forum, Cloud computing, D&O Liability, FEATURE ARTICLE, Financial, Insider Threat, Uncategorized, due diligence, hackers, identity-theft, malware, privacy, virtualization
Comments
One Comment on The Future of Enterprise and Web 2.0
-
Fredrik Matheson on
Tue, 22nd Sep 2009 12:22 pm
While I generally agree with Stowe and have great respect for his work, I’m of a different mind when it comes to make-versus-buy.
If you’re starting your social software project today, you can indeed buy a good toolset from the thoroughbreds (Jive, Socialtext, Atlassian). You’ll soon be able to buy decent tools from IBM and Microsoft, and perhaps Oracle and Cisco.
This was not the situation in 2007. Sure, Jive Clearspace, Socialtext and Atlassian Confluence were around back then, but frankly, they left much to be desired. Socialtext hardly had any social networking features, Confluence was still pretty macro- and wiki markup-heavy and Jive didn’t really get rolling until they released a great new version of Clearspace that autumn.
So at that point, making your own tool didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I personally looked at tons of wikis, blogs and forums and wanted just one thing; a tool that let me integrate them simply and a way to offer users just one profile that was re-used across silos, plus some way to get/maintain an overview of what was happening in the system. Activity streams, as you will remember, are a rather new pattern.
I’m not sure what the Fortran market looked like in the seventies, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were several competing versions in competition with one another. Perhaps it was too early to tell which version would win.
What is great today is that a lot of the companies selling social (business) software realize that they need to offer good APIs and simple ways of integrating with the applications a company already has. Here and now in 2009 your best bet is to buy a good tool from a company that gets it and knows how to succeed/survive, and find a lightweight way to integrate/interoperate with what you already have.
Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
