Thursday, January 17, 2008

What is Enterprise 2.0?

As I said, I barely got this buzz word “Web 2.0” in place when off pops the word “Enterprise 2.0” from my VPs mouth. So, I started my research on the word to find what it was about.

Introduction: The way we work is changing rapidly, offering an enormous competitive advantage to those who embrace the new tools that enable contextual, agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration to distributed workforces and networks of partners and customers. The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, Collaborative Technologies, Enterprise Social Software – If you have heard of any of these terms, they all mean Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0: It is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.

Enterprise Web 2.0: It is a micro-publication about the management, leadership and people issues raised by the next-generation of web technologies. It is aimed more at technology-savvy business managers than professional technologists, although geeks are more than welcome.

In simple words, Enterprise 2.0 has a simple definition. It is defined as the application of Web 2.0 technologies to the enterprise. But there are almost as many different meanings for "Web 2.0" as there are mashups, making "Enterprise 2.0" an equally nebulous concept. One latest and most talked about area in Web 2.0 is RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). RIAs and other new Web 2.0 communications technologies are hot, but applying them to the enterprise can be tricky. Six most active areas in RIAs - RSS Enablement, online office suites, mashup appliances, social bookmarking, wikis and all-in-one Web 2.0 appliances. We will discuss more in detail in one of my coming posts. For now, let us not dwell deep into it.

Enterprise 1.0 Vs Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 1.0

Enterprise 2.0

Hierarchy

Flat Organization

Friction

Ease of Organization Flow

Bureaucracy

Agility

Inflexibility

Flexibility

IT-driven technology/ Lack of user control

User-driven techology

Top down

Bottom up

Centralized

Distributed

Teams are in one building/ one time zone

Teams are global

Silos and boundaries

Fuzzy boundaries, open borders

Need to know

Transparency

Information systems are structured and dictated

Information systems are emergent

Taxonomies

Folksonomies

Overly complex

Simple

Closed/ proprietary standards

Open

Scheduled

On Demand

Long time-to-market cycles

Short time-to-market cycles

Enterprise 2.0 Conference takes a strategic perspective, emphasizing the bigger picture implications of the technology and the exploration of what is at stake for organizations trying to change not only tools, but also culture and process.

Beyond discussion of the "why", there will also be in-depth opportunities for learning the "how" that will help you bring Enterprise 2.0 to your business.

The Enterprise 2.0 Advisory Board is comprised of leading experts in the fields of technology for business, collaboration, culture change, and collective intelligence.

Some thoughts: In Web 1.0, every startup wanted to be the next Microsoft. In Web 2.0, they all want to be the next Google. At Enterprise 2.0, it seems that many aim to compete with both Google and Microsoft, offering online office suites that they hope can combine the best of both worlds: The collaboration capabilities of a Web-based suite combined with the control over your own data of locally installed software.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

What is Web 2.0?

For many days I have been scouting around trying to figure out what Web 2.0 was all about. I was barely getting my bearings in place, when my VP once mentioned about Enterprise 2.0. At first, I had a perplexed look on my face and thought to myself, not again. I barely understood one of them (Web 2.0) and then the other (Enterprise 2.0) pops up. Since then I got into many discussions with some folks at IBM, friends, colleagues and every time I find myself discussing but not being able to give a clear difference or define the two of them i.e. Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. It was then I decided to do a small research and find out what these terms really meant. First we will take a look at what is Web 2.0 and then in my next post we will look closely at Enterprise 2.0. Here we go...


What is Web 2.0 and what is isn't, a simple definition?

Web 2.0 isn't a thing... i.e. either a Framework, Technology, Product, Tool, Library, API, Module etc. It's a state of mind. It is a method by which we leverage existing technologies in new and innovative ways, linking people together by sharing, trading and collaborating.

Some highlights:

1. Term invented by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty and standards mostly held by Google.

2. A method by which we use existing technologies in new and innovative ways and bring the Desktop experience in a web browser.

3. Change in the way people view the web.

4. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) - Feed, Syndication (RSS, ATOM ), Web Services, Mashups.

5. Social web -Interact with the end user, End user is not only a ‘user’ but also a ‘participant’ involved in Tagging, Wiki, Podcasts, Blogging etc.

The RSS Image:


Web 2.0, a graphical representation:













Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Web_2.0_Map.svg

Note that I added XAML, Moonlight and Silverlight

Web 2.0, a Visualization
Now, seeing the above diagram (which I ripped off the web), it looks to me as if the Web 2.0 was everything what the ‘WEB’ dealt with. I again started scratching my head in despair, trying to figure out its technical scope. I did some more searching trying to get a picture of it technically and what it meant to business. My search directed me to a nicely put, techy and business driven ‘Visualization’ from Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 blog. This made a lot of sense to me as an engineer. Here it is.








You could visit his blog for more information.

Web 1.0 Vs Web 2.0
By now, did you ever wonder, was there ever something called as the Web 1.0. The answer is ‘yes’ indeed the term existed but it was not widely spoken about. I then, tried to put my thoughts in a table distinguishing Web 1.0 and the Web 2.0. Based on the research on the internet and this is what I came up with. Please note that some of the comparisons you might not agree with (or) are confused with (or) you do not understand. You can ignore them since I too share the same and have arranged it in the order it makes sense to me. You could look up http://joedrumgoole.com/blog/2006/05/29/web-20-vs-web-10/ and http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html for the list and some discussions around this.

Web 1.0 was about

Web 2.0 is about

Push Business models

Pull Business models

Customer Service

Customer self Service

Companies

Communities

HTML

XML

Home pages

Blogs

Screen scraping

APIs/Web Services

Web forms

Web applications

Centralized product development

Decentralized product development

1-on-1 customer relationships

Customer community relationships

Portals

RSS

Directories (taxonomy)

Tagging ("folksonomy")

Double Click

Google AdSense

Ofoto

Flickr

Akamai

BitTorrent

Britannica Online

Wikipedia

Content Management Systems

Wikis

Page Views

Cost Per Click

Publishing

Participation

Domain name speculation

SEO (Search engine optimization)

Wires

Wireless

Owning

Sharing

IPOs

Trade sales

Netscape

Google

Dialup

Broadband

Hardware costs

Bandwidth costs

Reading

Writing

Evite

upcoming.org and EVDB


Well, so I hope by now we at least have some idea about Web 2.0 and its scope. If we look up the internet, we come across many other resources which could get a complicated, but I think this is enough to start with.

However, this post does not end here. I am still researching and working with Web 2.0, so look out for some good stuff… coming soon….

Cheers,
Naveen…