The business value of Web 2.0
Bob Rhubart's Blog |
April 27, 2007 11:20 AM
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Comments (2)
Does Web 2.0 have a role in the enterprise? Opinions vary.
In Web 2.0 lacks the business impact of SOA, Burton warns, SearchWebServices.com's Rich Seeley reports that Burton Group senior analyst Richard Monson-Haefel, in a recent "telebriefing," took a dim view of Web 2.0's potential in the enterprise. Seeley sums up Monson-Haefel's opinion this way:
Web 2.0 is great for people seeking a friendly online community, but in the bottom line world of business the best plan is to stick with service-oriented architecture projects with the potential to make money.
From the same article:
[C]orporate developers may find ways to make use of individual Web 2.0 applications, such as wikis and blogs, for internal use inside their organizations, [Monson-Haefel] said. But he does not see a way that a developer or architect would make a convincing case for a profitable Web 2.0 application unless they are in the social networking business or have a business plan for starting the next YouTube.
This is a surprisingly limited perspective. First, why limit the use of Web 2.0 applications to developers or to the IT side of the house? One of the key aspects of Web 2.0 applications is the idea of collaborative value creation. Surely the business side could take advantage of those capabilities. Consider the characteristic user-friendliness of Web 2.0 applications. What if that user-friendliness made it possible for people on the business side use Web 2.0 applications to develop solutions to problems without involving IT? Wouldn't that add enormously to business agility?
Which leads to my second point: If you're writing off Web 2.0 because you can't think of a profitable product idea, you're missing the point.
Web 2.0 has a definite place in the enterprise, where it can create value and increase agility. If that's not a bottom-line consideration, then Jessica Biel is a man.
On that note, (Web 2.0 in the enterprise, not Jessica Biel) here's what Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni has to say in web 2.0 and SOA - where do they meet?, a post on the SOA - Snake Oil Applied? blog:
Web 2.0 can be conceptualized as a key enterprise computing trend, complementing SOA. It is now possible to envisage a rich ecosystem of interoperable business services, connected through common interfaces. Web 2.0 can be thought of as enabler of rich service consumer ecosystem for SOA, with capabilities for collaboration, orchestration, customization, context sensitive variation for services etc.
Comments
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Bob:
I'm a Web 2.0 proponent for many years, and also a SOA proponent (not to mention a practitioner of both). The question is not either/or but rather and, and how. That is, how may Web 2.0 and SOA be combined? What is the business value? I've worked with several customers where we have combined both for greater value. Web 2.0 is here, and it will infiltrate many enterprises through what some have termed the "Shadow IT" department. History proves this out, just have a look at heyday of client / server when many tech savvy business users began to use their office suite tool's scripting language and wrote macros to process their data. These "programs" and data were copied and extended and distributed throughout the user community (with little or no quality validation). If business users find value in Web 2.0 technologies they will find ways to use them with or without IT support. IT needs to empower their business users with Web 2.0 tools or they may have a new "Shadow IT" in their midst.
Posted by: rmanning on May 3, 2007 at 6:55 AM
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Dion Hinchcliffe has a good post on this topic of the convergence of SOA and Web 2.0 at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=102#more-102
Posted by: jlannin on April 30, 2007 at 10:36 AM
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