Comments on: Web 2.0 doesn’t work in the mothership, but… http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2006/05/web-20-doesnt-work-in-the-mothership-but/ The Virtual Investor Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:40:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Lee Bryant http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2006/05/web-20-doesnt-work-in-the-mothership-but/comment-page-1/#comment-11355 Lee Bryant Sat, 27 May 2006 13:20:23 +0000 http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.php/2006/05/14/web-20-doesnt-work-in-the-mothership-but/#comment-11355 Wotcha Ben. Interesting post. First, I think the BBC is not a typical enterprise at all. It seems to be somewhere between large public sector organisations and commerical enterprises, but has the advantage of being full of people who want and know how to communicate, which is why some of its well-known social media case studies are not actually as remarkable as they might seem, IMHO. Second, whilst you are right that "Web 2.0" and enterprise systems are very different, and building scalable enterprise-wide systems is very hard, you should bear in mind that not all enterprise systems are actually used enterprise-wide. I think what we will see is a separation between enterprise architecture and underlying systems (email, data transport, DMS, maybe others) on the one hand and higher order applications that use them on the other. Social software tools such as blogs, wikis, social tagging, bookmarking, recommendation systems etc all fall into the second category, and they should not seek to become enterprise-wide systems (although their output may be aggregated enterprise-wide). We are working with enterprise clients to create lightweight social inerfaces onto corporate systems and data that provide users with a local, usable window (perhaps for a single team) onto enterprise-wide systems. Part of the logic of this is that enterprise systems do the heavy lifting very well on the whole, but their interfaces are anti-social and suck big time. So, why not use them as part of the underlying architecture whilst allowing users much greater diversity of front-end tools? This is why - I think - we don't need to worry about Web 2.0 tools not being appropriate on an enterprise scale. I don't know of *any* system that can serve the needs of 5,000 people in exactly the same way. If we deploy Web 2.0 stuff in an intellligent way it can act as a force multiplier and add huge value to existing old-skool infrastructure. There are quite a few large companies out there experimenting with blogs, wikis and other tools. The next stage is how to bring them into the mainstream and connect them up with each other and with formal systems. I wrote something yesterday about how we address this challenge, and what skills are required to do it well: http://www.headshift.com/archives/002916.cfm Would love to chat more about this next time we catch up - it's a biggie! Wotcha Ben. Interesting post.

First, I think the BBC is not a typical enterprise at all. It seems to be somewhere between large public sector organisations and commerical enterprises, but has the advantage of being full of people who want and know how to communicate, which is why some of its well-known social media case studies are not actually as remarkable as they might seem, IMHO.

Second, whilst you are right that “Web 2.0″ and enterprise systems are very different, and building scalable enterprise-wide systems is very hard, you should bear in mind that not all enterprise systems are actually used enterprise-wide.

I think what we will see is a separation between enterprise architecture and underlying systems (email, data transport, DMS, maybe others) on the one hand and higher order applications that use them on the other.

Social software tools such as blogs, wikis, social tagging, bookmarking, recommendation systems etc all fall into the second category, and they should not seek to become enterprise-wide systems (although their output may be aggregated enterprise-wide).

We are working with enterprise clients to create lightweight social inerfaces onto corporate systems and data that provide users with a local, usable window (perhaps for a single team) onto enterprise-wide systems. Part of the logic of this is that enterprise systems do the heavy lifting very well on the whole, but their interfaces are anti-social and suck big time. So, why not use them as part of the underlying architecture whilst allowing users much greater diversity of front-end tools?

This is why – I think – we don’t need to worry about Web 2.0 tools not being appropriate on an enterprise scale. I don’t know of *any* system that can serve the needs of 5,000 people in exactly the same way. If we deploy Web 2.0 stuff in an intellligent way it can act as a force multiplier and add huge value to existing old-skool infrastructure.

There are quite a few large companies out there experimenting with blogs, wikis and other tools. The next stage is how to bring them into the mainstream and connect them up with each other and with formal systems.

I wrote something yesterday about how we address this challenge, and what skills are required to do it well:

http://www.headshift.com/archives/002916.cfm

Would love to chat more about this next time we catch up – it’s a biggie!

]]>