Business Benefits of Web 2.0 for the Enterprise????
Friday, July 13, 2007 at 10:14AM Is there bottom-line business value to adopting Web 2.0 technologies inside the enterprise? Can it actually change business by increasing profitability or innovation? These were questions posed by ZDNet Editor in Chief Dan Farber to Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText; Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise; and Satish Dharmaraj, CEO of Zimbra, at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. (Watch the video.) Although there were a few quantifiable benefits mentioned in passing, such as reduced email clutter and reduced information search costs, the discussion gravitated to cultural change. In a nutshell, the adoption of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration 2.0, etc. comes down to a cultural change towards information sharing, transparency, and silo-busting. Not many would argue against these things, but they are hard to quantify for those who demand hard numbers.
Ross Mayfield discussed the concept of "emergence" as allowing the "collective intelligence" to structure unstructured information. This was contrasted with command-and-control methods that look to place a structure on information and make it fit. The premise is that social networking (with related technologies such as tagging, wikis, etc) is a more efficient and accurate way to structure information. I believe this is true, particularly in rapidly changing industries, but again, how do you quantify this? I fear that those who demand hard ROI numbers for Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise will be left behind, closing their businesses even as they continue to ask for numbers.
Incidentally, "collective intelligence" raises the spectre of "Web 3.0". See Nova Spivack's Web 3.0 post which explains that "3.0" is the natural progression of Web 2.0, along with Semantic Web, data mining, and artificial intelligence technologies. The good news is that a lot of really smart people are working on helping us make sense out of all the information in and around us.
Dave Kresta
Just found this resource on Collective Intelligence. Look for more writing on this topic soon.
Reader Comments (1)
enterprise software has become increasingly complex for users. Enterprise Software has a whole new, largely unpenetrated market to enter that of small businesses, referred to as the SMB or SME segment. Such enterprise functionality has traditionally been beyond reach for a typical small business.