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GCN Home > 09/26/06 web stories

Web 2.0 business models affecting enterprise systems design

By Wyatt Kash, GCN Staff

The ease with which consumers routinely network and share content over the Internet-and the emergence of new companies enabling them-are forcing business and government executives to rethink development plans for their own enterprise systems.

"If the Web 2.0 is in its infancy, then Enterprise 2.0 is a total newborn," Andrew McAfee, associate professor of Harvard Business School, said at a conference attended by more than 400 Washington area business, technology and government executives last week in McLean, Va. "We're using Enterprise 2.0 as short hand for blogs and wikis behind the firewall. But that's entirely too limiting," said McAfee. "We have not yet seen all the neat things that will go on inside enterprises."

What Web 2.0 actually embodies, and its implications for enterprise systems managers, is still open to debate.

For government IT executives like Aneesh Chopra, Virginia's secretary of technology, it means moving beyond publishing information online and instead integrating a variety of services that meet community needs. Chopra, who kicked off the conference put on by regional networking publication ExecutiveBiz, pointed to the distinct needs of war veterans returning home to Virginia. While Virginia is recognized as one of the most advanced among states using the Internet to provide public services, many of those services, he said, still require people to go to individual commonwealth Web sites.

"If you need help, looking for health care information, you go to (Virginia's) health care pages and click." But veterans are also looking for help with jobs and social needs, and must search separate sites for that information. "That's Web 1.0. Imagine having a sense of community for them. That can happen with Web 2.0," he said.

For Jobster founder and CEO Jason Goldberg, "Web 1.0 was all about getting things online. Web 2.0 is going the next step and making it work," with sites, he said, that are "created by the people, for the people every day." The Seattle-based firm works with a number of Fortune 500 companies, as well as the State Department, using relationship management software to tap into blogs and online communities as an alternative to job boards to recruit specialized talent.

More news on related topics: Enterprise Architecture, Management, IT Management, Web Strategies



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