Business Intelligence Network - The Vision for BI and Beyond

What Does Web 2.0 Mean to the Enterprise?

Published: July 17, 2006

Web 2.0 represents a completely new approach to producing and sharing information in enterprises.

Last month, I began a series of articles on the effect of new and evolving enterprise integration and Web technologies on business intelligence by discussing service-oriented architecture (SOA). This month I want to continue the discussion by looking at Web 2.0.

Given that Web 2.0 is a relatively new term, I would first normally define what Web 2.0 means. The problem here is there are no common standards, or even any industry agreement, on what constitutes Web 2.0. Some industry pundits even argue that Web 2.0 is simply a new marketing buzzword that gets attached to any new Web technology that comes along. I hope, however, that after reading this article you will see that, despite its fuzzy meaning and overzealous vendor marketing, Web 2.0 does represent a whole new Web environment that will have a significant effect on the way people use the World Wide Web.

The Beginning
The origin of Web 2.0 comes from a series of Web development conferences started in 2004 by O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International (now owned by CMP Media). CMP Media in fact owns Web 2.0 as a service mark for conferences. They caused a huge controversy recently when they sent a cease and desist letter to the non-profit organization IT@Cork telling them to stop using the term in their conference names. This move was incorrectly interpreted by many people as a claim by CMP for exclusive usage of the term Web 2.0, whereas CMP was, in fact, only claiming exclusive use of the term for conferences. Whether CMP can sensibly make this claim or not will not be debated here.

Wikipedia, the free Web-based encyclopedia, states that “Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online.” It goes on further to say that, “In contrast to the first generation, Web 2.0 gives users an experience closer to desktop applications than the traditional static Web pages.” This definition implies that Web 2.0 not only improves the way users interact with each other, and but also adds new technologies that provide a richer user experience. The focus on both improved usage and improved technology is why there is confusion about what Web 2.0 means. Some people focus on usage improvements, while others focus on the technology improvements associated with Web 2.0.

In addition to trying to define Web 2.0, it is also important to understand why there is so much focus on the Web 2.0 concept. The bursting of the dot-com bubble back in 2001 had a dramatic negative effect on the Web software industry. The failures occurred not because the ideas or the technology were bad, but because the technology was immature and people were simply not ready to use it. Today, the technology has matured and evolved, and there is also a much wider audience ready to use it. Web 2.0, therefore, heralds a new era of the Web and this is why there is so much marketing (or hype!) associated with the term.

Returning to O’Reilly and CMP Media, there is an interesting article by Tim O’Reilly about Web 2.0 on the O’Reilly Web site. In the article, he lists some of the Web sites and concepts that reflect the new Web 2.0 environment. Examples here include Google AdSense, Flickr, BitTorrent, Wikipedia, blogging, upcoming.org, EVDB, tagging and syndication (as in real simple syndication, or RSS). Even if you are not familiar with all these names (it is worth googling the ones you don’t know), you most probably recognize enough of them to realize they are all associated with people-driven collaboration and information sharing.

New Techniques
Web 2.0 is not so much about new technologies, but more about how people use the Web. It is about new Web techniques that allow people to easily communicate and share information with each other.

Most of the emphasis of Web 2.0 is, of course, on personal users and consumers and how they use the Web on the public Internet. Web 2.0 will, however, have an impact on how business and corporate users collaborate and share information. Technologies and techniques such as RSS, wikis and blogging are already being used by enterprise users. The information produced is not only for internal consumption, but also external usage.

Managing the Sharing of Information
Web 2.0 represents a completely new approach to producing and sharing information in enterprises. To date, the publication of data and information is managed by governance procedures that ensure that the corporate information is accurate and current. The information produced by Web 2.0 approaches could be controlled by the same procedures, but this removes the Web 2.0 benefits of fast and easy information sharing.

Web 2.0 information should be considered unmanaged, and organizations need to provide guidelines to employees on using Web 2.0 approaches to publish information. Some software vendors, for example, let their developers publish blogs for external consumption provided they don’t say anything disparaging about the company or publish confidential data. The blogs also make it clear that the information is unofficial. These blogs are incredibly useful information sources for product users because they contain current and more detailed information than is typically available on official Web sites. Of course, there are certain companies where this approach to information sharing will not be allowed, for example, for security reasons.

Web 2.0 information sources are also valuable data sources for the business intelligence and business integration projects. Companies are increasingly combining structured and unstructured using data integration, text mining, enterprise search and portal technologies. As Web 2.0 usage grows, these data sources must be taken into account in integration projects.

Another Tool in the Toolbox
You can see then that Web 2.0 represents yet another way of producing and sharing information. It is not a replacement for existing approaches, but instead offers another tool in the toolbox for knowledge management. It does, however, provide a very powerful way for users to collaborate and publish and share information.

Next month, the third, and final, article in this series will look at the impact of enterprise search on the business intelligence environment.