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Saved by 17 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2009-01-30


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Why is Web 2.0 particularly interesting right now for the enterprise?

Highlighted by fm-blognotes

While some might look at the social aspects of things like Web 2.0 as marginal subjects when things get tough, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to the deeper implications of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Many of the more transformational aspects of the 2.0 era now have extensive groundwork laid for them, are available in genuinely enterprise-ready solutions/pilots, and many have just been waiting for the right situation; the driving need for businesses to change and transform in the face of radically different business conditions.

Highlighted by jwalzer

Why is Web 2.0 particularly interesting right now for the enterprise? Web 2.0 has always been about making the most of the intrinsic power of the network and whatever is attached to it.

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Web 2.0 has always been about making the most of the intrinsic power of the network and whatever is attached to it.

Highlighted by fm-blognotes

This can be people (social computing and Enterprise 2.0), low-cost dynamic Web partners (open APIs and cloud computing), the world’s largest database of information, lightweight integration (mashups and Web-style SOA), or maximizing the value of the network itself (the network effects that everyone talks about), and much more.

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These collectively represent better, more efficient, and less expensive ways to accomplish things that we previously used to do without the network’s help or with methods that didn’t take advantages of how the network works.

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Read this year’s Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions for 2009 for more perspective on this topic.

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Here are some practical ways that 2.0 approaches can help organizations grapple with the challenges of 2009.

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Note that the struggle with many of these, as with so much of Web 2.0, is that there is a major shift in control, a much higher level of transparency, and an openness that many businesses can be uncomfortable with.

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However, to organizations that are willing to overcome these largely political, cultural, and mindset challenges, significant opportunities are available for the taking, often for relatively modest investment.

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Move to lower-cost online/SaaS versions of enterprise applications.

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paying for yearly upgrades and new license fees is a major, recurring budget line item most organizations would like to eliminate now that most companies have a computer in front of every worker.

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Open source software is an option and is certainly cheaper up front, until the support costs and other factors come in.

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There are, in fact, numerous lower-cost options today for virtually any type of business software but unless it’s browser-delivered, or even better, externally hosted as SaaS, you can’t use the provider’s economies of scale to drive down the full range of costs from deployment of upgrades and technical support to hosting, backups, and management.

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In general, moving to SaaS for anything that isn’t strategic to the business is the best place to start if you’re trying out externally hosted apps for the first time.

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recent reports say that moving to a SaaS version of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system will save the average firm 25% to 40%, a number that likely translates well to other types of business applications given the core nature of CRM to most enterprises.

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A good place to get a sense of the options for SaaS versions of traditional business applications is to look at Monolab’s excellent Office 2.0 database.

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Use Enterprise 2.0 to capture the knowledge and know-how of employees.

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Enabling open, persistent, freeform collaboration amongst far-flung workers allows vast amounts of institutional knowledge to pour out into visible places on the network where that information can then be studied, reused, and learned by others including (perhaps especially) new workers down the road.

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In the mass layoffs taking place in organizations around the world, tens of thousands of years of built up expertise and capability are walking out the door, largely untapped; the knowledge residing in inaccessible places such as e-mail accounts, file servers, meeting notes, and most devastating of all, in the minds of the departing workers.

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While blogs, wikis, and other Enterprise 2.0 tools can’t be a direct replacement for people, they allow organizations to be highly elastic in terms of headcount while resisting the erosion of vital corporate culture, knowledge, historical context, and critical methods.

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You’ll also reap the other benefits of Enterprise 2.0 reported by many adopters: higher efficiency, more transparency, better communication, and so on.

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Making your intranet a vibrant, ever growing, worker-powered, two-way social media landscape is one of the surest investments you can make in your organization.

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Strategically move IT infrastructure to the cloud.

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There are many reasons to start moving business applications and data to the cloud: Businesses have to keep latent capacity on hand to deal with high-water marks for demand, leaving a lot computing and network infrastructure lying idle and underutilized.

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The same businesses also can’t amortize the cost of purchases at nearly the scale that top-tier cloud vendors can, further driving up cost.

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conomies of scale are the name of the game in cloud computing and ready, on-demand access to them is what vendors provide, among other more run-of-the-mill benefits such as simplifying capacity planning and encouraging a more consistent enterprise architecture.

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I did some back-of-the-envelope costs calculations on moving to cloud computing in a post here last year and the results were eye-opening in terms of savings.

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The bottom line: We are a ways from moving all our enterprise computing to the cloud but it’s high time to begin the process of moving today.

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Embrace new low-cost models for production such as crowdsourcing.

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I explored this topic in detail in my recent exploration of the emergence of compelling new open business models.

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There are numerous competitive and economic reasons to move to crowdsourcing models for many aspects of modern business. These include using the vast audience of people on the network as a primary source of innovation, research, and product development as well as customer support, sales, and marketing.

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Crowdsourcing does require a certain set of skills however, that is very different from traditional corporate hierarchical command-and-control, which works well even in outsourcing relationships, but much less in a social computing environment.

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While crowdsourcing is providing increasingly impressive stories of late (see the aforementioned open business models article), it’s also clear that some organizations will be a failure with it and that primarily online firms will have the most success.

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Lower customer service costs by pro-active use of online customer communities.

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I took a look at the state of online customer communities a few months ago and things haven’t changed much.

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Reduce application development and integration time/expenditures with new platforms and techniques.

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Relational databases have been challenged by new successors such as documented-oriented databases like CouchDB and distributed computing/storage systems like Hadoop.

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Then there is ongoing story of enterprise mashups which bring lightweight integration and composite application development, often by end-users, directly to lines of business. See this list of mashup providers, most of which are offering highly capable solutions.

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Open your supply chain to partners on the Web.

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with open APIs and Web services, it’s now possible to do in such a cost-effective fashion that it could end up being one of the major growth areas of our business.

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I covered this important Enterprise Web 2.0 topic recently so I won’t go into detail here, but if you want double-digit growth during the downturn in whatever otherwise staid industry you are in, there are few more powerful 2.0 techniques for doing it than turning your business into a strategic open platform on the network.

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Overhauling and reinventing paper and digital workflow.

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Going beyond lipservice to green business, transforming how we carry out processes is essential in driving down costs and increasing business agility.

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The DOE reported in 2006 that US paper making alone used 75 Billion KWH and U.S. data centers and servers using another 61 Billion KWH of electricity, never mind that print and digital media supply chain costs can represent as much as 35% of every dollar spent by public and private organizations, exclusive of labor.

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Social networks and their activity streams are increasingly providing a means to start creating emergent workflow as well, though they are not as far along as mashups and Enterprise 2.0 in being able to address this opportunity today.

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The modern technology landscape is an enormous one and the pace of technological change is only increasing, greatly challenging the 21st century organization which still tends to adopt new things in a top down manner.

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Web 2.0 models offer one of the most potent ways we presently have to regroup, reorganize, and systematically improve what we’re doing in terms of private enterprise, government, and public service.

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