CTC - "Making Sense of Web 2.0: Impact on the Enterprise"

The afternoon breakouts began with Dion Hinchcliffe, editor-in-chief of Web 2.0 Journal, talking about "Making Sense of Web 2.0: Impact on the Enterprise" (He zoomed through the presentation pretty quickly and had a lot of diagrams, so I will try to post the presentation later)

A reductionist view of Web 2.0 - A Read-Write Web + Lots of People Using It = Collective Intelligence

Network Effects - A good or service that has value based on other people having it (e-mail, wikis, etc.)

There are a lot of definitions of Web 2.0s and they are all true in some way.

Aspects of Web 2.0
Stratgic positioning
    - web as a platform
User Positioning
    - you control your own data
Core Compenticies
    - Services, not packaged software
    - Harnessing collective intelligence

Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of the platforms. Going beyond the page to the idea of applications

7 tenets of Web 2.0

1. Web as platform - open, reusable Web services, permalinks, syndication
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence - services that get better, the more people use them
3. Information as the Core Capability, Not Software - Google Maps, "Blogosphere"
4. End of Discrete Software Releases - continous improvement becomes the norm
5. Lightwieght programming models - users can be their own programers
6. Fundamentally federated software systems - examples: iTunes, blogosphere
7. Rich User Experiences - Results found in software are as good as can be found anywhere else

Core competencies of Web 2.0

• Online services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability

• Maintaining control over unique, hard to re-create information that gets better with more users

• Trusting your users as co-developers

• Harnessing collective intelligence

• Leveraging The Long Tail

• Lightwieght user interfaces, development models

The most pressing issue facing the enterprise over the next year is the conflict/overlap/reconciliation between SOA and Web 2.0

The simplicity of use and ability to exploit network effects has resulted in enormous online communities.

Now users have extended beyond early adopters and techies. It now has global adoption and blogosphere doubles every six months

Will this happen in the enterprise?
Two pre-requisites to acquiring  knowledge

• Motivation - People will discover that they can help themselves to solve problems and get information
• Context - Understanding concepts and reasons for them. As people become more familiar with benefits it will become more widespread

We should strive for less transactional interactions and more tacit interactions. Tacit interactions provide the largest productivity gains.

Technologies allow us to allocate activities more effieciently between tacit interaction and transactional employees.

Technology to boost the quality, speed and scalability of the decisions employees make.

Applying Web 2.0 to the enterprise
- Low barrier, available anywhere
- Allow users to structure business information (folksonomies over taxonomies)
- Continous bottom-up management by end-users
- Business processes exposed as Web services (or at least a feed)
- Easy inclusion of external Web services (outside-in)
- Based on portable, recognized standards
- Web 2.0 style collaboration (Wikis, Visible Path, etc.)

Adding enterprise "context" to blogs - Question is whether this stuff eliminates benefits of blogging
- Enterprise Integrated Secruity
- Approval Process for Posts and New Users
- Content Auditing (preferably automated)
- Open Services - Both usage and consumption
- High-Quality Enterprise Federated Search (huge problem)
- Flexible Hosting Options

Governance is a key issue in that when you open yourself up to other departments and users, you bring up

Examples:
IBM and QEDwiki
ProgrammableWeb.com
MashupFeed.com

Government agency creates an internal wiki. They wanted to get workers to contrinute high value information, but they couldn't get contributions from workers because it wasn't in their self-interest.

The result of long-term Web 2.0: Social Computing

• moving from top-down to bottom-up model

• moving from ownership to experience

• Power is moving from institutions to communities

Major Trends for Enterprise 2.0

• Enterprise Mashups
• Ad-hoc yet integrated
• Consistent Foundations

Reccommendations
Small Pieces, Loosely Joined
Reuse first, build structure
Provide minimum structure and let users build from there