A few weeks ago, I posted a short comment on potential uses of wikis as a means of creating collaborative engagement between a company and its communities, for example in the development of a regional environmental strategy.
Well, I just finished reading an article by Andrew McAffee in MIT Sloan Management Review called Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration which carries the same theme into positing new ways for companies to use Web 2.0 technologies to create and manage knowledge.
His thesis quite simply is that 'old' knowledge management platforms such as intranets will be replaced by group authorship -- mediated by blogs, wikis, tagging etc. -- which make "an episode of knowledge work widely and permanently visible." With Web 2.0 technologies you not only get the results of knowledge work stored in a searchable fashion, but you also get the process of creating the knowledge made observable.
His conclusion . . . "Enterprise 2.0 technologies have the potential to usher in a new era by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible. Because of the challenges these technologies bring with them, there will be significant differences in companies' abilities to exploit them. Because of the opportunities the technologies bring, these differences will matter a great deal."
Exactly the same can be said of companies which choose -- or do not choose -- to explore how Web 2.0 technologies might change their relationship with their external stakeholders.
When the worlds of SOA and Web 2.0 collide
Noted business and IT forward-thinker John Hagel wrote a detailed piece about what he calls the highly dysfunctional gap between SOA and Web 2.0. And it's true, there are few worlds in the IT industry that seem more opposite from each other, yet are more strangely intertwined, than SOA and Web 2.0.
Yet these two cultures are generally failing to cross-pollinate like they should, despite potentially extraordinary opportunities.As most of you know, SOA or Service-Oriented Architecture, is a corporate means of normalizing the aspects of IT systems to make them more shareable, rewirable, dynamic, and integrated. Web 2.0 is a similar, but more populist and social concept, that also involves in its own way the turning of applications into platforms that can be reused, shared, and aggregated. For its own part, SOA has stodgy-sounding composite applications, while Web 2.0 has a virtually identical concept with the much hipper moniker: mashups, a reference to the musical phenomenon it so much resembles.
Hagel notes that these two worlds seem quite far apart, despite being practically related in their technology genes, though certainly far from being identical twins. For one, SOA is technically more complex and has higher-order concepts, like orchestration, while Web 2.0 has social, presentation, ad hoc organization,and participatory aspects that SOA generally doesn't address at all. As a result, as Hagel kindly observes, I've noted in the past that SOA and Web 2.0 practically complete each other. Yet these two cultures are generally failing to cross-pollinate like they should, despite potentially extraordinary opportunities.
Posted by: Jyothi Goswami | May 17, 2006 at 12:00 AM