11/13/07

WOW...Can You Believe that the Web 2.0 Craze Started From a Conference...

The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Out of that discussion came the concept that the web was more significant than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. Strangely, could it be that the “dot-com collapse” marked some kind of turning point for the web, that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? Undoubtedly it has, in the 3.5 years since, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken hold, with more than 10.5 million citations in Google. Yet…as with all phenomenon, there is still confusion over Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0 and mashups. Let me attempt to clear the water here:

What is Web 2.0?
Let’s start with some basic definitions. Web 2.0 describes the second generation of the World Wide Web, which focuses on the ability of people to collaborate and share information online. Web 2.0 refers to the transition from static HTML Web pages to a more dynamic Web that is better organized, and is based on serving Web applications to users. Additional improved functionality of Web 2.0 includes open communication with an emphasis on Web-based communities of users, and more open sharing of information. Web 2.0 is sometimes seen more as a marketing term than a computer-science-based term. Blogs, wikis, and Web services are all seen as components of Web 2.0.¹

What is Enterprise Web 2.0?
While most of the Web 2.0 efforts have occurred outside of the corporate firewall, a growing number of companies have been utilizing what is fondly referred to as “Enterprise Web 2.0.” Enterprise Web 2.0 focuses on modernizing or building upon traditional in-house applications with components or widgets from outside the corporate firewall. Enterprise Web 2.0 empowers knowledge workers with Web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, and mashups; providing them with the information they need, when and how they need it.

As Dion Hinchcliffe points out in the October 22nd, ZDNET article The State of Enterprise 2.0, “Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis. The discussion often starts with these simple freeform tools and then progresses beyond these to platforms that are better for specific situations.”

“For example, enterprise mashups do for user-created Web applications, what enterprise blogs and wikis do for user-created content and structure. Predictive market products such as HP’s BRAIN platform and online innovation facilitators such as “Innocentive” are other potentially more sophisticated examples of Enterprise 2.0 platforms. I’ve witnessed prediction markets in particular become enormously popular in the last year or so as enterprises seek to better tap into the cumulative wisdom of their workers. Social book marketing is also gaining speed in the enterprise as a way of providing a rich information discovery mechanism internally.”

What is a Mashup?
The term mashup refers to a new breed of Web-based applications created by hackers and programmers (typically on a volunteer basis) to mix at least two different services from disparate, and sometimes competing Web sites. A mashup for example, could overlay traffic data from one source on the Internet over maps from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google or any content provider. The term mashup comes from the hip-hop music practice of mixing two or more songs. This capability to mix and match data and applications from multiple sources into one dynamic entity is considered by many to represent the promise of the Web service standard (also referred to as on-demand computing).²

Now the challenge: if these are the technologies of the future, how does a company such as LogicLibrary, an enterprise software company, take advantage of this buzz and market interest...more to come.


1. Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hinchcliff/?p=150
2. Source: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/m/mash_up.html

11/ 6/07

Web 2.0 and governance: not an oxymoron?

At the surface, combining Web 2.0 and governance sounds like a complete oxymoron – after all, aren’t mashups, wikis, and all that other hot 2.0 technology about rapid application development being placed in the hands of the end user? What does the G-word have to do with that?

But wait, haven’t we been here before? All those quick-and-dirty VB and Excel-based apps of the past and present living in the nooks and crannies of your enterprise, and the joy of fielding service calls coming into IT complaining that an app, which you know nothing about, stopped working because someone in IT made a change to a data view or API or … that you had no idea was being used by a department you never heard of! Web 2.0 has the potential to repeat this nightmare, with your SOA initiative becoming the hostage. Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent blog on the top ten challenges facing enterprise mashups raises this issue quite coherently, stating “If enterprise mashups unleash hundreds of new applications inside an organization, then who will catalog them, support them, maintain them, and fix them when they break?”

Fighting Web 2.0 technologies is definitely not the right answer – as Joe McKendrick points out, they will happen in your enterprise (and involve your SOA) whether you like it or not, so you’d better get in front of them. And the best way to do this is to bring these business-oriented mashup developers into the big tent of SOA, encouraging them to participate in the process of defining and prioritizing needed services, and to register their use of services so that IT knows who to contact when rev 2 (or 3, or …) of those services needs to be deployed and prior versions retired. In other words, governance. But Web 2.0 governance needs to be lightweight and seamless to mashup developers or they’ll simply work around it, and they also need to gain more than they lose from participating. A well-designed development-time services repository/registry with integrated governance and an easy-to-use front end to find interesting services will do exactly that. It’s the catnip that will help you herd those Web 2.0 cats, or at least keep track of their general whereabouts.