Dion Hinchcliffe has been writing some interesting stuff about web 2.0 in the enterprise. His latest post is a bit of a rant against Wikipedia, but push on and it is worth the read. Lately I have been pondering the impact of things like SOA and
mashups in the enterprise context, blending in the web dialtone discussion that is happening on the O’Reilly Radar.

Putting on my prediction hat, I would say on the back-end of the information architecture web 2.0 will have an impact similiar to that of Linux. That is, it will displace some really expensive, customized solutions, free up resources for real innovation, and push everyone forward about 10 years at no cost. You see, the really interesting thing that web 2.0 applications do for the enterprise is to dramatically reduce costs for existing processes. For next-generation tools like Basecamp you don’t need hardware, software, drivers, or an administrator. You need an intern and a scripting language. As a long-time ETL guy, I have to say that is huge. It strips away all the barnacles of the information architecture, leaving only the actual work that needs to be done.

I understand that there are new methods and processes that are waiting to be born using AJAX and mashups and the like. I don’t doubt that many of these can have a dramatic impact on the enterprise. However, when someone is going to sit down with the CFO and try to arrange funding for a big project, this isn’t going to be all that impressive. I take an Ecclesiastical view of these things and think that there truly is nothing new under the sun.

That being said, Web 2.0 has a great upside with very little risk or up-front cost. If your organization isn’t exploring this phenomenon it should be.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Databases, Information Architecture, Systems Integration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.