Every Organization Should Have A Web 2.0 Story

Duh! Isn’t it obvious that every organization should have a Web 2.0 story? I know it is obvious to us techies. But the more I talk to the business community (including technology leaders), the more I realize that Web 2.0 is not obvious to them at all. A lot of people in the business community have heard about Web 2.0. They know Ajax is a technology and developers are excited about it. They also know and have used GoogleMap. They know and enjoyed MySpace, LinkedIn and YouTube. But that’s very much it. The question of whether/how Web 2.0 is going to matter for their business has not quite cross their minds yet.

“Web 2.0 story”- what do you mean “Web 2.0 story”?  I am not suggesting that every organization should build an Ajax product or go acquire a social networking site. I am merely suggesting that companies should take a serious look at web 2.0 from a business perspective, evaluate what/how web 2.0 might impact your business. The conclusion may be “we will never adopt Ajax because of reason blah blah”, which can be totally valid and I have seen quite a few situations that Ajax is not a good fit. But Web 2.0 is such an important evolution that businesses should not turn a blind eye on it. Business people owe to themselves to take a look at Web 2.0 and develop their own story.

Before I get into “why business community should care about Web 2.0”, let me clarify a few concepts first.

1. “Organization”: I am referring to the various entities that produce, implement or consume information technology. These entities include: technology providers (infrastructure software providers, development tool vendors, application software vendors, etc), system providers (operating system, server systems, storage systems, etc), service providers (system integrators, consulting firms) and corporations (fortune 500, global 2000, Small to medium sized companies,).

2. “Business community”: I am referring to executives and managers within the above defined organizations, for example, managers at various financial brokerage firms, executives at insurance companies, product managers at software companies, the sales/marketing team at a system integration firm, or managers at government agencies.

Here are the top 5 reasons why business people should care about web 2.0:

1. You want to be successful: Web 2.0 presents a great opportunity for you to be successful, because web 2.0 gives you ways to increase revenue, improve efficiency, leapfrog competitors as well as take care of your employees. These newly enabled options are not commodity that everyone would exploit yet. So the opportunity is yours. If you don’t take the opportunity, somebody else will.

2. You want to increase your top line revenue: Rich Internet Application technology significantly enhances user experience for your customers. The “integration” ingredient within Web 2.0 enables your organization to deliver newer functionality to your customers better: more integrated, more streamlined and more efficient for your customers.

3. You want to improve operations efficiency and lower cost: Instead of getting into a big paragraph explaining how/why web 2.0 can significantly improve operations efficiency and lower operational costs (I will cover this in separate posts), here are a few examples: Enterprise mashup offers a dramatically simpler way of integration; “Software As A Service” provides a much more cost effective way of delivering and managing applications.  Finally, Web 2.0 presents a credible and reliable way of moving legacy applications to the “modern” world, without losing functionality or reliability, while significantly increasing agility and efficiency.

4. You do not want your competition to leap frog you (and you want to leap frog your competition): Web 2.0 represents a great opportunity for companies to get ahead of competitors. I am sure that you probably have the plan and strategy to defeat your competitors – the chances are that your competitors have probably the exact same plan and strategy to defeat you. Otherwise ether you or them would have disappeared long time ago. Web 2.0 represents a strategic opportunity that was not available before because:

a. On one side, Web 2.0 is a far reaching movement that will have dramatic impact on both businesses as well as consumers;

b. On the other side, Web 2.0 is not well understood by everybody yet – so if you’ve figured out how to leverage web 2.0 before your competitors, you have a unique weapon at hand that they don’t have.

5. You care about your technology team: Developers, either inside your organization or outside of your organization, are critical resources for you that either build or maintain your business systems. Yes, you may not care about technologies, but web 2.0 technologies have captured the hearts and minds of developers. Would you rather your technology team be part of, help drive and thrive within this community or be left behind?