By Steve Lee and Lane F. Cooper
BizTechReports.Com
Beyond the buzz and hype, there is solid evidence that Web 2.0 is capturing the imagination of IT managers who must address the growing imperative to support enhanced collaboration within and between organizations. Business customers and consumers across industries are demanding a greater say in the development and delivery of the products and services they buy. And a new generation of workers is walking through the door with an expectation that they will be able to engage in multi-media interactions with peers and partners.
That is why Web 2.0 collaboration tools are not just a pop culture gimmick. Within the coming decade, they may replace traditional enterprise collaboration platforms, and become the collaborative platform of choice as enterprise leaders and IT managers deploy them to gain competitive and innovative advantages.
Indeed, analysts at Forrester Research predict that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 is set to grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013. Social networking, Mashups, and RSS applications are the Web 2.0 collaboration technologies that are expected to capture the greatest share of corporate IT dollars.
Migrating Toward a New Approach to Collaboration
“The closed business processes of the past have prevented enterprises from realizing their full potential for agility and flexibility,” says IBM’s Phaedra Boinodiris, SOA & Web 2.0 Product Marketing Manager.
“Enterprise leaders and IT managers can exploit their enterprise’s potential quickly with collaboration tools that overcome information and business process ‘silos.’ SOA revolutionizes not just the way applications work with each other but the way people interact with processes. Web 2.0 builds upon SOA’s vision to support enterprises , foster Business/IT alignment and make companies more agile by offering a platform for services to be accessed, mashed & tailored,” explains Boinodiris.
She points out that at the intersection of people and processes, Web 2.0 adoption changes the way end-users co-create value on experience networks. “These Web 2.0-enabled experience networks empower people to collaborate, co-create, and experience personalized business processes as never before.”
- Collaboration is enhanced by allowing end users and customers to engage through social computing. It facilitates introductions, transactions and teamwork between parties with common interests, and creates “knowledge” environments that facilitate discovery and action.
- Co-creation is enabled by making it possible to enlist customers to shape new technologies, co-shape future offerings, while accelerating the development of advanced technologies and solutions.
- Experience is personalized for each user by making it possible to tailor sites that optimize the chances of cross-selling and up-selling offerings based on known personal preferences. Because new media can be used to engage and immerse users in a highly tailored environment, a highly customized perspective about the specific needs of a customer can be developed. Organizations are consequently equipped with much greater insight into customer needs and desires.
Keys to Success:
Successful adoption of Web 2.0 tools will depend on two principal factors. First, and most importantly, enterprise culture and leadership must be fully “bought in” to the democratization of enterprise information resources and processes. This requires awareness and a thorough understanding of business processes and goals, at all levels of the business. This is critical, because it will form the basis for performing the risk and cost benefit analysis against which success will be measured.
Second, the enterprise should have an installed and proven internet-based network infrastructure. Ideally, a collaboration-ready enterprise IT infrastructure should be based on componentized and automated business processes that are delivered as services. Web 2.0 technologies work best in an open environment. That is why replacing proprietary processes and technologies with well documented work flow based supported by a technology infrastructure based on a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a huge success factor.
Expected Collaboration Outcomes
By making collaboration tools central to business processes, enterprises can realize four principal business benefits that will have a measurably positive impact on ROI.
- Strengthened customer and partner relationships. Collaborative tools provide enterprises with an opportunity to establish mutually productive relationships with customers and partners. Customer forums and interaction, for example, played a critical role in the design and features of Sony’s Playstation 3 gaming and entertainment device.
- Supporting a distributed workforce. Globally competitive companies are already providing collaboration tools to their geographically dispersed team members so they can collaborate and innovate continually. According to a study of leading companies sponsored by IBM, 90 percent of employees currently work away from headquarters while more than 60 percent work in locations that are different than their managers.
- Improved response to change. Effective change occurs when people, processes and technologies shift in response to new realities in the market. To make this happen, many decisions need to be made and coordinated. Collaboration provides the basis for accelerating this process while improving the quality of the decisions. This explains why a recent IBM research initiative found that 98 percent of CEOs surveyed rank innovation through collaboration as their number one priority. And, over 60 percent of mid-size firms say that collaboration tools are imperative to their business success and growth.
- Improved management of enterprise knowledge. Collaboration tools allow enterprises to harness collective knowledge and experience -- sometimes called the “wisdom of crowds.” Web 2.0 technologies can provide an effective platform for capturing the knowledge that cannot be captured in traditional structured enterprise data repositories (databases, data warehouses etc).
For more information on how experts at IBM can help your organization develop effective collaboration strategies, call 877-426-3774
http://www.forrester.com/ER/Press/Release/0,1769,1207,00.html
