FT.com / Technology - WEB 2.0: Can mash-ups match up to business needs?

FT.com / Technology - WEB 2.0: Can mash-ups match up to business needs?


WEB 2.0: Can mash-ups match up to business needs?
By Richard Waters
Published: January 24 2007 10:40 Last updated: January 24 2007 10:40

Coming soon to an office near you: wikis for workers, mash-ups that make creative use of the different pools of data at your fingertips, and a host of other flexible new internet-based tools to make working life more productive.

At least, that is if you believe the latest hype coming out of the technology industry.
The “Web 2.0” movement, first apparent in a wave of consumer applications that grew up on the internet, has now spread, inevitably, to the world of corporate computing. This technology wave is all about creating low-cost applications on the fly to make communication and collaboration easier – but it also comes with some heavy marketing overkill.

“There’s no limit to the technology industry’s ability to hype new technologies,” warns Russ Daniels, chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard’s software division. He adds, though: “Enterprises are all about getting people to collaborate to do things they couldn’t do on their own,” so the potential benefits from this new technology certainly sound compelling.

Notoriously difficult to pin down, the “Web 2.0” label is generally applied to three things. One is a family of “social” software – the blogs, wikis (web pages that are open to a group of people to write on or edit) and other tools that have made it easier and cheaper to self-publish and collaborate on the internet. This promises an escape from e-mail hell: rather than circulate endless e-mail attachments to groups of co-workers, why not co-operate on web-based applications?

A second use of the term is to describe a low-cost, rapid approach to software development. The most visible results are mash-ups, services created by combining data from different sources to create composite applications. Thanks to new standards-based technology (Web 2.0 draws heavily on the so-called web services standards), it is now easier to create these ad hoc.

Third, the phrase is used to describe new browser-based technologies, such as Ajax, that make internet applications behave more like desktop-based software, creating a richer experience.
To a certain extent, these three ideas are linked. A better user experience for web-based applications makes it more likely they will be adopted as alternatives to PC-based software. With more information stored online, it becomes easier to combine applications and services and merge data for ad hoc mash-ups. This points to the broader force at work behind Web 2.0.

“We are past the point where the internet has become the platform,” says Tim O’Reilly, the technology commentator and publisher who is generally credited with coining the term “Web 2.0”.

Software applications, he says, behave differently when they are born and live on the internet.
Interaction by the people who use these online applications creates network effects that add to the value of the software. “Fundamentally, you write applications that get better the more people use them,” he says.

Mr O’Reilly sums this up as: “‘Live’ applications driven by databases that are self-improving.” Applied to the corporate world, the idea is starting to be felt in two distinct ways.

One is a new generation of communication and collaboration tools that could enhance and, in some cases, replace the familiar instant messaging and e-mail that are now a standard part of office workers’ lives.

Together with things such as RSS (a method of syndication that automatically “pushes” newly published content to people who have expressed an interest in seeing it) and internet search, this family of technologies could create an “entirely different kind of information system” in the corporate world, says Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext, an early exponent of the idea of applying wikis to the workplace.

These tools also promise “high-engagement marketing” and other new forms of communication that stretch beyond corporate walls, adds Kim Polese, chief executive of SpikeSource, which recently announced an initiative with Intel to sell appliances to companies that let them add the tools to their intranets.

The second impact of Web 2.0 inside companies is a broader one, and points to a more open, rapid-fire approach to software development that raises deeper questions about how companies adapt technology to their business needs.

For instance, creating composite applications by combining data from different sources on the fly could smooth the workings of complex supply chains, says Mr O’Reilly. If factories published data about their output levels, other companies could combine it with data of their own to present a clearer view of supply and demand.

If this sounds a lot like the vision of “web services” that was first advanced in the late-1990s, that’s because it is. The banner of web services for corporate use has been taken up most recently by proponents of “service- oriented architecture,” or SOA – systems that draw on re-usable software components, or services, from different sources to create composite applications to solve particular business needs.

The products of these heavy-duty corporate systems sound very much like the mash-ups promoted by the Web 2.0 crowd. The difference, says Mr Daniels at HP, is that mash-ups and other lightweight Web 2.0 tools are available to the average office “power users”, the sort of workers who in the past have proved adept at stretching Excel spreadsheets for wider departmental uses.

While these are the claims made for Web 2.0, there are some significant forces weighing against it that seem likely at least to delay its progress, if not stop it in its tracks.

As with the adoption of the PC, it is a technology that has crept into corporations through the back door: the IT department may not know it is happening, but small teams of workers have already started to turn to web-based applications to supplement the applications on their corporate intranets.

“The challenge for enterprises is that a lot of this has crept in through the ether,” says Ms Polese. “As with [the adoption of] open source, the CIO is often finding out about it after the fact.”

Given the nature of many of these tools, this piecemeal adoption should sound alarm bells. Security is one concern: how safe is corporate data submitted to a Web 2.0 internet site? What is the risk that important corporate information will be lost completely? At a time when compliance looms large for CIOs, this user-driven approach to technology adoption cuts across the grain.

Also, the ideas of some of the Web 2.0 evangelists look likely to produce a culture clash for both IT departments and corporate managers. The nature of the technology – dynamic applications that are always in the process of adaptation – runs counter to the way most IT departments operate.

“It is never finished, it is an ongoing process,” says Mr O’Reilly – not the sort of message that will sit well with risk-averse CIOs more accustomed to testing new applications exhaustively before adoption.

To be effective, the sort of new technologies that go under the “Web 2.0” banner also rely on a willingness to share data that in the past has sat in isolated silos. “Understanding what data you can abstract and share among users is the fundamental Web 2.0 exercise,” says Mr O’Reilly.

How much data are most managers prepared to share, even with colleagues in their own companies, and under what circumstances? The answer to that question will play a big part in determining whether Web 2.0 mania can come anywhere near to living up to the hype.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007