Enterprise 2.0

Overheard: Elton Mayo

“One friend, one person who is truly understanding, who takes the trouble to listen to us as we consider our problems, can change our whole outlook on the work.” Elton Mayo

Overheard: Enterprise Web 2.0 inbreeding

Spending too much time with the ‘in crowd’ who ‘get’ Enterprise 2.0 can result in serious over-enthusiasm and lack of realism. Martin Kloos, The state of Enterprise 2.0 and why we need new stories

Ever since Forrester released a report last month saying that Web 2.0 technologies will have a world-wide market value of $4.6 billion by the year 2013, the early adopters have been patting themselves on the back, saying “I told you so.”

Not so fast, bucko. 2013 is a long way away and enterprise IT is not just going to open its doors to the new kids on the block just because a new generation is entering the workplace. What’s more likely to happen is that legacy IT applications will make updates, incorporating Web 2.o features that work for a particular industry or software application.

At the very least…those Web 2.0 apps wanting consideration will need respectable names. Manly names. Serious names. Names IT professionals don’t feel embarrassed talking about at manager’s meetings. Twitter? Tweets? I don’t think so.

Overheard: The SAPanese take Web 2.0 seriously

“Surely SAP is a big, boring enterprise software company, about as far from the furious consumer innovation of Web 2.0 as you can imagine. Yet it’s been clear to me for years that SAP takes the ideas of Web 2.0 very seriously.” Tim O’Reilly, SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?

Tim writes: By my definition, a web 2.0 company is one that uses internet-fueled network effects to build services that get better as a direct result of user interaction. Figuring out all the clever different ways to do this is the heart of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 started out as the name of a conference! And that name had a very specific purpose: to signify that the web was roaring back after the dot com bust! The 2.0 bit wasn’t about the technology, but about the resurgence of interest in the web. When we came up with the idea back in 2003, a lot of programmers were out of work, and there was a general lack of interest in web applications. But we saw a resurgence coming, and designed a conference to tell the story of what was going to be different this time.

Overheard - Influencing “The New Influencers”

Who says the blogosphere is nothing but a hall of mirrors?

“Peggy Rouse of whatis.com read the entire draft and provided me with valuable feedback, particularly some early advice that led me to completely restructure the order of the chapters. Her team also wrote the book’s glossary. Whatis.com was Wikipedia a decade before there was a Wikipedia. It is still an incredibly valuable source of technology knowledge.” Paul Gillin, The New Influencers / acknowledgements

From the Wall Street Journal review: Some two in five Internet users in the U.S. read blogs, according to a 2006 Pew survey, giving citizen-commentators the potential for more influence than ever.

How, then, should companies deal with the world of blogs, as well as podcasts, social-network sites such as Facebook and other “social media”?

That question is at the center of “The New Influencers,” written by former Computerworld editor Paul Gillin.

Overheard - Enterprise 2.0

“The coming wave of online emergent business networks is the real Enterprise 2.0 story. The impact on a large company from using blogs, RSS and wikis is not significant when the real guts of the business is locked into legacy ERP, SCM and CRM systems.” Bernard Lunn, Read/WriteWeb.com