I gave a presentation in the Hyderabad barcamp titled Web 2.0: What's in it for Enterprises ? Most often Web 2.0 is associated with technology companies and startups. However, I believe once the initial euphoria and hype around Web 2.0 settles down, it is the enterprises (organizations in verticals like retail, banking, media etc.) who will reap the benefit of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. For an enterprise there are Web 2.0 opportunities both within and outside of the firewall.
Me presenting (Pic courtesy: Krishnendu)Over the years there has been a perceptible change in the online strategy followed by organizations. Initially organizations used their online presence to talk or advertise their products or services. Over time the importance of customer experience and choices set it. So the focus shifted from "product" to "customer", thus online applications became more and more user friendly, customer started getting more choices in terms of personalization, customization. Latest in this customer focus is the usage of RIA technologies like Ajax, Flash to provide more interactive and intuitive experience to the customers.
The next stage in this evolution would be to move toward "Customer Community", wherein organizations will use their online presence to facilitate customer community around their product/services. The inceptive for that is manifold. Marketing can be outsourced to the community; customer community and interest groups can be used to create buzz for a product. By nature people tend to believe any feedback provide by their circle of acquaintance while making purchase decisions. Community feedback can also be used while developing new products. A classic example is Google Labs; the same model can be employed by organizations while introducing new products to the market. Better understanding of customer community will also help organizations to better define their go-to-market strategy.
Having said that there are certain challenges before enterprises in Web 2.0 adoption for their customer facing online applications, at present there is no model to quantity business benefit of adopting Web 2.0. In absence of definitive ROI, it will be very hard to sell Web 2.0 to business heads who sponsors most IT initiatives in an enterprise. Besides there are other open questions like - where does Web 2.0 fit in an Enterprise Architecture ? Where to place Web 2.0 vis-a-vis other paradigms like SOA which IT has been advocating for the last couple of years.
The next stage in this evolution would be to move toward "Customer Community", wherein organizations will use their online presence to facilitate customer community around their product/services. The inceptive for that is manifold. Marketing can be outsourced to the community; customer community and interest groups can be used to create buzz for a product. By nature people tend to believe any feedback provide by their circle of acquaintance while making purchase decisions. Community feedback can also be used while developing new products. A classic example is Google Labs; the same model can be employed by organizations while introducing new products to the market. Better understanding of customer community will also help organizations to better define their go-to-market strategy.
Having said that there are certain challenges before enterprises in Web 2.0 adoption for their customer facing online applications, at present there is no model to quantity business benefit of adopting Web 2.0. In absence of definitive ROI, it will be very hard to sell Web 2.0 to business heads who sponsors most IT initiatives in an enterprise. Besides there are other open questions like - where does Web 2.0 fit in an Enterprise Architecture ? Where to place Web 2.0 vis-a-vis other paradigms like SOA which IT has been advocating for the last couple of years.
There is a silent evolution happening in enterprise workplaces also; the shift from transformational to transactional and then to tacit type of job. In today's knowledge age, most critical jobs are tacit in nature - requires very complex interactions between multiple stakeholders from multiple domains both from within and outside organizations. Though organizations have optimized transformational job and transactional job by introducing automation (using tools) and process optimization (like ISO, CMM etc.) respectively, the challenges faced by them today is to optimize the productivity of their tacit workers/employees. That can only be done by optimizing the discover-connect-share-execute cycle involved in tacit jobs through effective collaboration.
Therein web 2.0 technologies like RSS (syndication), VoIP, blogging etc can play a role. Though these technologies individually solves different aspects of collaboration, what we need a collaborative platform which will utilize all these technologies to provide a end-to-end solution. (Web 2.0 in enterprise workplace has got a new name now: Enterprise 2.0). Many product companies have already smelt the opportunity in this space and started positioning their offerings. However these are still early days towards a true collaborative platform.
Therein web 2.0 technologies like RSS (syndication), VoIP, blogging etc can play a role. Though these technologies individually solves different aspects of collaboration, what we need a collaborative platform which will utilize all these technologies to provide a end-to-end solution. (Web 2.0 in enterprise workplace has got a new name now: Enterprise 2.0). Many product companies have already smelt the opportunity in this space and started positioning their offerings. However these are still early days towards a true collaborative platform.
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