Web 2.0 in the enterprise
Now while the internet is abuzz with all things Web 2.0 – mash-ups, AJAX, social applications, folksonomies…, the typical corporate IT departments continue to operate in the Stone Age. And perhaps with good reason – not many people have focused on business benefits that the typical large corporation could expect by adopting Web 2.0.
It would help if there was a concise definition of Web 2.0 that everyone could agree on. Sadly, there isn’t. The expression was coined by Dale Dougherty to refer to the second generation of the web. Nowadays, however it is an umbrella term used to describe everything from social apps, blogs, wikis, AJAX, RSS to mash-ups.
So what is Web 2.0? To me at its core Web 2.0 is a participatory web. Users are no longer at the mercy of web channel operators to create web sites that someone thinks that they should have. Rather they decide the content they want, their participation level and in doing so also add value back into the web.
Blogs, wikis and social bookmarks need no introduction – both are simple ways for companies to open up the broadcast mechanisms to the entire set of employees. Social bookmarks (the ability to tag ones bookmarks and share them – see e.g. del.icio.us) are a great way of capturing the contextual knowledge that employees place on links. Surprisingly only blogs and to a lesser degree wikis have caught on in any significant measure in enterprises. This is sad. Wikis are a great lightweight alternative to structured corporate portals. Social bookmarks provide a cheap and elegant solution to the contextual information that often employees have but usually have no way of easily sharing. IBM's Dogear (still in development) is one such social bookmarking software targeting the enterprise.
AJAX, RSS, lightweight web services and scripting languages have collectively ushered in an era of the “apps on demand”. With these technologies, one can create mash-ups (aggregation of data from different sources to create new applications) as diverse as realty to most popular news/images/links. Mash-ups in the enterprise would allow employees to create their own applications instead of begging for/waiting for/struggling with the apps that IT deigns to provide. E.g.
- Show me a list of all the customers in the mid-west who have bought software in the last year and have more than 10000 employees (a mash-up between data in a CRM and Google maps)
- Find me a sales engineer who is located 100 miles from a client in Dayton who has skills in Oracle Retail and who’s free on Tuesday morning (a mash-up between data in SAP HR, Google maps, MS Outlook and Salesforce.com).
Mash-ups in the enterprise would be akin to employees building their own “applications” using Excel.
The popularity of AJAX, RSS and mash-ups is probably directly related to the effort that the IT nerds have spent in making web services and composite apps completely obscure and difficult to use over the last five years. The promise of ubiquitous web services floating in the ether ready to be composed on demand into unique web applications has been over hyped for a while now. The promise has always been there. However, the software purists got a hold of the web services protocols and made them overweight and practically useless. They added layer upon layer of complexity until one needed a Ph.D. in computer science to understand a web service API. Similarly, the IT guys never quite got around to trust the business guys enough to allow them to build their own apps. This is not to say that there haven’t been valiant efforts to break this IT hegemony. Bowstreet’s Factory was a composite application engine that promised non-technical users the ability to create apps. But it was completely unusable as a tool. More recently, SAP has spent a lot of effort promoting Visual Composer with similar promises. This is however, too closely tied to the SAP bandwagon.
If mash-ups are to succeed in the enterprise, we need a couple of things to happen. First, the IT guys need to loosen up. They need to allow web services to multiply organically. Instead of top-down publishing a smallish fixed set of “corporate” web services, they need to let employees build and publish their own services as well as call upon services in the wider internet. Second, we need a light weight composition platform for this new world of data / services everywhere. Think Ning, but for the enterprise. Think Excel for the Web 2.0 world. Such a platform will likely usher in a host of new focused “applications” that are created/used/shared without IT’s deep involvement. Teqlo may be a contendor for this platform.
All this has implications for the way we advise our clients. At a high level, it changes the ways we think about IT governance and IT delivery. At an organization level this has the potential to warrant the creation of a set of “application designer” roles to help craft these new business applications. But most importantly perhaps, by advising our clients to build such a Web 2.0 platform, we’ll enable them to unlock their creativity and the artificial shackles imposed by the traditional IT model.
