Sunday 29 March 2009

Corporate view - Web 2.0 (article 1)

In recent years the view of World Wide Web is changed dramatically, in a way as no one expected. Being a simple website is nothing special now, but being in the interactive sessions are preferred by the public. All these changes came into notice when the new term ’web 2.0’ was introduced by Dale Dougherty in a conference in the year of 2004. As per Dale web 2.0 is an economic, social, technical trend which is the basis of the next generation computing with characteristics of openness, networking effect and collaborative participation (Musser, 2006).

The inventor of WWW, Tim Berners lee’s vision was to create a single global collaborative information space. From the early time of web itself the large organization made the most from the web. They started gaining business and eventually lead to the business success. Even though the area of research and development in the computer science field is around 60 years, which is very small compared to other branches like, mechanical and electrical engineering, the innovations in the computer field is exponentially high. In the computer industry the transition or change is not a big deal, people are ready to accept the changes and interesting scenario is most of us don’t know when did the change happened, although they were using the latest versions. This happened in the case of web also, after the new technologies introduced in the web itself, people are using that without knowing the change. When Dale Dougherty introduced the term web 2.0, at that time everybody was surprised because of the buzz of the word. At that time most of the people are using the incarnation of the web itself, in other way they were in the environment of web 2.0.

John Musser claims that the organizations which are ready to implement web 2.0 technologies within their infrastructure and to the market have got much more chance of getting the competitive advantage compared to others (2006). Web 2.0 as whole we can say that, it’s a set of technologies and approaches which is meant for collaborative intelligence,
learning and improvement in two way direction (Jones,2008). There are a lot of new services which can be considered as part of web 2.0 and these are social networking, blogs, wiki’s, syndications, tagging etc. The question arise here is how these new age technologies going to support the organization in their culture. In the early days the computer industry transformed from enterprise user towards the home user. From then it changed to USB, instant messages, and web based applications (Gutmans, 2006).

Now the organizations are using the wiki to know the progress of projects as it supports the collaborative editing by the authorized people (Anderson, 2007). And vast uses of external and internal blogs are popular in the organization (Gutmans, 2006). The estimate numbers of blogs nowadays are 75m; it shows the popularity of the blogs. A good example of organization using blog as tool is a UK based company named, Favorit Limited. The company specializes in bringing collective media towards a mass worldwide internet audience, and they also simplify the complicated online contents to the end users (Jones, 2008). One of the reasons of growing importance of the web 2.0 in the organization is the change in the business applications. Although the organizations are willing to use the wiki’s, blogs, podcasting they were not considered as critical tool for the business success. The main thing we need is application service providing (ASP) or software on demand, which supports the business (Gutmans, 2006).

Web 2.0 can be used as tactic in the organization in two way, first one is to allow the full participation of the customer, results in capturing the collective knowledge which eventually helps in enhancing the product. The second point put forwarded by the Kim Jones is the improved team communication and the collaboration in the organization(2008). One of the main thing to notice in implementing the web 2.0 technologies is , it must be user oriented. In the past the web approach was from top to bottom, without giving any attention towards the end user. Now scenario is changed to bottom-up approach, first know the customers then implement according to their interest (Jones, 2008).

It all shows that just applying the new technologies to the organization is not the solution. The sign of successful organization are strong leadership, innovation and change management which results in the competitive advantage. The organization needs to know the socio economical effects which are going to happen as an after effect of the new implementation. There must be a need for the organization rather than a trend of new technology. In the level of IT the changes are enormous, because we need a lot more computer power and bandwidth which inculcate the amount of applications used in the web 2.0. The other part of IT infrastructure is using the open standard software for the applications which eventually reduce the cost dramatically (Jones, 2008). The open standard helps to exchange the data between the applications or to make one application call to other. In the next level this will lead to more specialized application, which can be bought and integrate with our web based application(Gutmans, 2006).

Conclusively every business enterprises are ready to use the web 2.0 as their driving force to get the advantage, whether it may be a small or large organization. Now the concentration is on the end user, so every organization is ready to provide whatever may be the end user’s expectation to maintain their business processes and move towards the success. It all shows that enterprises as an entity doesn’t exist, but the interaction between the people and the organization are keeping the organization’s breath.


Reference:


• Musser. J, 2006, Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices,
Available: oreilly.com/catalog/web2report/chapter/web20_report_excerpt.pdf (Accessed March 27,2009)


• Jones. K, 2008, Managing a Web 2.0 Strategy.
Available:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/09550f26-410b-11dd-9661- 0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1 (Accessed March 28, 2009)


• Gutmans. A, 2006, PHP Leads Web 2.0: A Closer Look at the Hidden Drivers and Enablers of the Second Internet Revolution,
Available:www.zend.com/topics/php_leads_web2_0.pdf (Accessed March 18, 2009)


• Anderson. P, 2007, what is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education, JISC Technology and Standards Watch.
Available: www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf(Accessed February 25, 2009).


4 comments:

  1. Good points Praveen. It is just amazing at how the open source software foundation Web 2.0 is based upon has opened a torrent of creativity never seen before in the computing field. It confirms the age-old principle that when two or more minds 'tune' to each other, they create a composite mind greater than an individual one. You apply the collaborative approach of Web 2.0 tools and you can imagine what kind of mind is created!

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  2. Good perception of web 2.0. I liked the way you differentiated web 2.0 as bottom-up approach. To my understanding,adopting open standard prInciples in web 2.0 technologies like blogging has raised more concerns in the recent years where we have seen may people violating the rules of posting stuff in the blog. For example: Copyrighted content, piracy etc.., What is your take on such things, u have any idea of how to regulate such things in web 2.0 technologies?

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  3. Your approach to the topic was very interesting. Your eloboration of web2.0 technologies in the real organizational use is very convincing. I agree with your view on the technology as a driving force for organization's success not as a complete solution for all the problems.

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  4. This article is good expression of web 2.0 technology and you also looked at how customer interact with the business using web 2.0 technology which is not many students did not look at. Saying that could you explain me about how much it affective in knowledge management.
    well done..

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