Thoughts on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0: What does it mean to you and me?
It’s the Thanksgiving week in the US and the Christmas lights outside our office building come on tonight. Along with discussion of shopping deals, Black Friday and Turkeys, conversation will drift towards Christmas and the New Year…. Which means one thing: pundits, gurus and forecasters will roll-up their sleeves to make big predictions for “the year to come” and the list is sure to contain the ‘usual suspects’ which is beginning to include Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.
Flash back to over a year ago, Business Week had a cover story on how “Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning.” Sure myspace, linkedin, youtube and Second Life have scores of Digerati excited. And surely some businesses have also jumped the bandwagon while a fewer entrepreneurs are raking billion-dollar valuations while academics like Andrew McAfee continue to ideate on “How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye” and researchers like Professor Murugesan begin compiling handbooks on Web 2.0, 3.0 and X.0
Not to be left behind, Infosys’ researchers are going full steam, studying and articulating aspects of the trends shaping up. Case in point is the research on adoption of Web 2.0 in Retail, financial and other verticals that some of our offshore researchers have published.
With all the analysts, entrepreneurs and academics going gung-ho on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, why is it that I get the nagging feeling that all the babble is little more than a storm in the teacup?
I guess I need to spend the Christmas break on getting to a point where I am comfortable advising CIOs and leaders that all this is (yet another) ‘business altering paradigm’ that they can sell to their business…. And more importantly, when they are talking with me, - in my avatar of Architect from a service provider - help answer hard questions such as: what are the synergies between an organization’s offshoring strategies and Enterprise 2.0? How do these technologies help my top-line and bottom-line?
