Chief information officers (CIOs) will be forgiven for looking at Web 2.0 with a sense of déjà vu. Using technology to harness the power of a connected user community—isn't that what mainframes did? The ability to post thoughts and ideas on multiple subjects remotely—people did that back in the days of UUNet electronic bulletin boards. MySpace just made it cool.
Or take a site like eBay. For 12 years, it has embodied the idea of people gathering virtually and deriving value from their numbers. Sounds like a wiki to me. Oracle first posited the idea of a hub—what we now call a portal or an extranet—back at its New Orleans AppsWorld conference in 2001.
So just what about Web 2.0 is actually new for CIOs? How can they—and should they—take advantage of this "new"; trend, where people are as much a part of the value as the data or the application itself? At Innovation Advisors, we look at Web 2.0 as both a consumer trend and an enterprise trend, but the ramifications for the latter are clear.
- The occasional application: The financial advantages of having an application that lives in the clouds—one that continuously evolves and that you access only when you need it—are clear. Do you really need a new version of Microsoft Office every four years? Wouldn't it be better to use only what you need and skip what you don't? (Talk about familiar—this is also called "software as a service.")
- Customer feedback: Having a way for customers to comment on your products, especially if you sell through an indirect supply chain, is a great way to get feedback (and it's probably cheaper than doing marketing surveys). Business intelligence can tell what people are buying; blogs will tell you what people are thinking.
- Expanding your influence: If there's one business-oriented social networking site, it's probably LinkedIn, which enables you to post business recommendations and network with colleagues (during the bubble, there was a company called sixdegrees with a similar idea). That works for suppliers and vendors as well.
But there are other advantages for CIOs as well. In the old days, your choice about software was build or buy. Now it's build, buy, or rent. You have far many more options in terms of the applications you access, thanks to these trends. And the changes won't stop coming. We believe that this trend will change the purchasing cycle. If everything is a widget that lives in the clouds and you plug it into an existing application, how much will your work change? How much can you learn from other people about how well those widgets work?
There is a downside for CIOs, however, which harks back to the past. What happened when MIS circled the wagons around the glass house in an effort to keep control? Users brought in their own technology to be more productive, forcing IT to accommodate PCs. The Web 2.0 world has the potential to reduce the power of CIOs, especially those who are so controlling of the technology in their company that they're viewed as a chokepoint for productivity
So take some advice: Learn to be comfortable and collaborative when it comes to Web 2.0 applications. You can deal with it on your terms or on the terms of the people who have the real collected power: the users.
