Web 2.0 and the Enterprise

Web 2.0 and the Enterprise

Create systems that people want to use

By: Vince Casarez; Philipp Weckerle

Jul. 13, 2007 10:15 AM

Ever since the term was first coined in 2004, Web 2.0 has generated an incredible amount of interest and momentum around Internet services. Web 2.0 services empower users to combine all relevant information into a single location so they can be more productive in their work environment. In addition, Web 2.0 enables users to form ad hoc associations with users inside and outside their organizations as part of a “social network.” To do this, users need tools that allow them to quickly and easily assemble these services in a meaningful way.

Understandably, many enterprise developers want to find out how they can leverage the exciting new Web 2.0 services within their companies. A key challenge for IT is that social networks are traditionally unstructured and uncontrolled, whereas IT applications are inherently controlled and structured. To inject Web 2.0 services such as wikis, blogs, and discussion forums into the enterprise, organizations must have structured and secured interactions that don’t impede the ad hoc nature of this new user model.In this article, we investigate the key drivers for the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise and examine the impact of these technologies on the existing enterprise software infrastructure. We focus on some of the key technologies, tools, and related standards that are emerging.Web 2.0 is the latest buzzword among IT professionals. What is Web 2.0? According to Tim O’Reilly, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.” In other words, Web 2.0 is the concept that the next generation of applications must combine the latest achievements in technology with the latest cognitions in the behavior of Web users and the ever-growing popularity of social networking services. Is Web 2.0 something enterprises should be interested in? If you look closely at today’s work environment, there’s a strong dependence on contextual relationships, which today’s IT infrastructures can only poorly represent.

‘Generation I’ – The Users Who Are Driving Web 2.0
An interesting aspect of the Web 2.0 discussion is the question of who is driving Web 2.0 in the enterprise. In the past, corporate IT departments, especially at the executive level, defined the working environment and decided which tools the company’s employees should have at their disposal.

Today, however, IT environments are increasingly being shaped by individual users and the tools that they employ in their personal use of the Web. Power users, realizing the potential of the technology they use in their free time, tend to slip “unauthorized” implementations into their workplace, below the radar of the IT department. Furthermore, this new generation of workers, having used various Web 2.0-style services as youths and later as university students, have come to expect (even require) Web 2.0-style services as part of their work environment. Now enterprises and IT departments are pushed to provide the environments and services that their employees demand. This grass-roots approach, in contrast to the traditional top-down implementations, poses significant challenges for enterprise IT, but at the same time ensures that applied technologies and services gain broad acceptance almost as soon as they are implemented by the IT department.

But Is Web 2.0 Relevant for an Enterprise?
Over the past several years, technologies such as Web logs (or “blogs”), wikis, discussion forums, and RSS-based news aggregation gained instant popularity the minute they were introduced. In every case, the technology was introduced on the consumer side, not as part of a broad enterprise-wide implementation. In fact, often these technologies and services were originally dismissed as irrelevant to the enterprise environment.

But the growing popularity of these and other services has made them quite relevant for enterprises, which now regard Web 2.0 features and services as the solution for delivering flexible, next-generation user experiences that result in increased collaboration and productivity.

Web 2.0 Challenges for the Enterprise
Introducing services from the bottom up, based mainly on consumer-grade infrastructure and software, poses significant risks for the commercial and organizational success of an enterprise. Major concerns emerge about issues such as availability, professional management, and security.

It usually takes some time for consumer-introduced services to become mission-critical for daily business. Ten years ago, e-mail was just another communication channel; today, it is considered essential – sometimes crucial – for day-to-day business. Today, nobody would dream of running an e-mail server “under the desk,” so why should new services from the Web 2.0 world run unofficially on individual user machines? Web 2.0 services need to be tightly integrated into the IT infrastructure of an enterprise, where they can be effectively managed to provide the availability and reliability expected from an enterprise service. However, most Web 2.0 services are built on heterogeneous technology stacks so they must be integrated into the enterprise infrastructure. Typically, integrating products and maintaining their integration incurs significant overhead. Thus, improved out-of-the-box integration means lower total cost of ownership (TCO).Implementing Web 2.0 services poses more than just IT-related challenges. After disparate new services are brought into the mix, users soon realize that the full power of these services comes from the integration between them. Today’s business is driven by a tight Web of semantic connections between technically unrelated artifacts. It is common for users to switch between different applications – and hence change context multiple times – while working on a particular business case. Connecting unrelated services is usually a challenge for the IT department and significantly increases the TCO, unless the services are pre-integrated – an advantage that business software vendors entering this space can bring to the table.

The Service-Oriented World
As existing systems are re-architected and new applications are developed, Web 2.0 and service-oriented (or rather Web-oriented) architecture, which clearly separate functionality from the user experience of a service, assume an important role in application design. In addition, the social aspects of Web 2.0 – which are mainly driven by the requirements and expectations of the “Generation I” workforce – are exerting influence on new applications.

Let’s take the example of a discussion forum. Within an enterprise, discussion forums provide an ideal way to discuss topics and share ideas in an unstructured manner over time; participants can be geographically dispersed, living and working in different time zones. In most cases, discussions revolve around a particular topic – a piece of information, a document, a customer case, and so on. In today’s systems, the connection between the discussion thread and the topic being discussed is documented only informally within the discussion thread; most participants discover that the discussion exists only by opening the discussion forum. But what happens when someone approaches the same topic from the other end – for example, a customer who accesses the topic via the CRM system or a document in the document management system?

Unless that person is involved in the discussion thread, he or she can easily miss important information about the topic. In some cases, the information may be informally documented elsewhere in the system, so a loose connection may already exist. For the user, however, having to chase this information is time-consuming and frustrating. Users are forced to make the connections on their own, and even if they make the connection, how do they find and navigate to the correct discussion thread?

In a Web 2.0 scenario, the discussion forum would have the ability to link to or reference other artifacts – such as other services, applications (for example, customer transactions in a CRM application), or documents – as “attachments” to a discussion thread. The transactional application would know that it had been referenced and would indicate the reference, providing users with a connection back to the information in the discussion thread. In other words, Web 2.0 is all about creating systems that increase in relevance as the number of users increases.

In addition to the “contextual connection” (linking or referencing applications), less obvious services and technologies such as phones could be brought into the overall user experience. Another way to enrich the user experience is to integrate presence awareness into the systems, services, and applications to provide a more efficient communication infrastructure.

Communication – Efficient and Instant
Especially in an enterprise environment, efficient communication is essential. Although e-mail has surpassed many other communication channels in importance, it has also skyrocketed in frequency and volume. Other effective communication channels such as instant messaging (IM) are gaining importance. While initially trivialized as simply “chatting” for personal pleasure, IM is now recognized as an important means of efficient, timely communication with the built-in benefit of instant feedback.

Instant feedback is realized in two ways: feedback about the status of the person a user wants to communicate with, and feedback in the form of the person’s reply, potentially in real time. This service can be leveraged in many ways to increase the contextual value of information within an application. For example, let’s look at the discussion forum again: the identity of a discussion participant could be linked with his or her IM status and viewed by anyone looking at the thread. In addition, other users could be allowed to contact the person directly via IM or e-mail.

Another aspect of Web 2.0 is accessibility of services. While applications were once accessible only via regular workstations, modern communications technology allows services to follow you wherever you go. Cell phones, mobile devices, and even Internetwork routing (for example, from IM to phone) provide an unprecedented level of service availability and access to applications.

With the introduction of “over IP” services, such as voice over IP (VoIP), and channel-independent communication protocols, such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the endpoint and communication channel become irrelevant. Communication requests are routed between different types of devices, whether phones, IM clients, or other SIP-enabled devices.

Intelligent routing, in combination with aggregation of services, ensures that messages and information end up where they need to be – where you are – and not in some obscure place or scattered around in different applications.

A Picture of the Future?
Imagine a scenario involving Sam, a seasoned veteran in our company, who works in a Web 2.0 world.

Before leaving home, he goes through his latest messages via the company’s “Web top.”

While on the train to work, Sam gets a call on his cell phone from an important customer, who asks about the status of an order she placed last night. The customer’s call was routed to Sam’s cell phone from his office phone, because Sam’s present status indicated that he was “on the road,” and his preferred communication method in this case is his cell phone. Sam promises to call the customer back as soon as he arrives in the office. As a reminder, Sam creates a task for himself using his cell phone, which synchronizes the task back into his calendar.

When Sam arrives at the office, he logs into the company’s network, and his status is set to “in the office.” He opens the corporate Web top to see what’s on his plate for today. Recognizing the callback task he added earlier, he looks up the customer’s record, which indicates the forwarded call from this morning; the system automatically recorded this information based on the customer’s phone number. Sam makes a note about the call, stating that it was an inquiry about the order status.

Under Recent Orders, he locates the customer’s order and sees that the order has a threaded discussion attached to it, as well as the protocol of an IM conversation about the order. He quickly accesses the discussion and reviews the conversation, which tells him that Frank, the clerk who is processing the customer’s order, has some questions. Fortunately, the presence indicator shows that Frank is online. Sam uses the Contact via IM option to open an IM conversation. Frank explains to Sam that the order was initially missing some information, but all was cleared a couple of minutes ago, so he was able to process the order.

Immediately following the conversation, Sam uses the Contact via Phone option to initiate a phone call with the customer to update her about the status. After the call, Sam changes the status of the task to indicate that the customer’s request was completed.

Meanwhile, a colleague asks Sam to review a customer contract. A new task for the review request appears in Sam’s task list, and Sam uses the action in the task list to navigate to the relevant document. The document management system shows a connection to the CRM system entry for the customer, which Sam checks to find the details about the customer. He then opens the document and reviews it. After he finishes, he marks the task as done, automatically forwarding the process to the next required reviewer.

A glimpse of the future? Not at all. This is Web 2.0, and it is here now.

Web 2.0 – More Than a Fancy Term
Too often, new ideas and concepts in the IT world disappear as quickly as they appeared. Not so with Web 2.0. If you look closely, it’s nothing new. Almost all of the pieces that comprise the concept have been around for quite some time and have evolved into a better and complete whole.

Web 2.0 is not about inventing something new; it’s about how to leverage existing tools and services in new ways, and how to reflect contextual relationships between apparently unrelated services to produce a holistic view of things – to create systems that people want to use, rather than have to use.

Research Sources

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