Enterprise 2.0 - The Business Mashup
Charlie Osborne, Paid Search Analyst at Spannerworks, takes a look at the complexities many brands face when trying to keep up with the latest IT developments in a business and user-focused world.
2007 is set to be the year that Web 2.0 tools converge with business and enterprise. Google's purchase of YouTube showed the economic value of social networks in terms of consumer intelligence and advertising revenue. However, the tools and practices used in these consumer-driven networks differ significantly to the current standards of Enterprise IT where large back-end systems rely on hierarchical controls.
IBM, Microsoft, Intel & Oracle are leading the way to integrate open-source business solutions, but they must take consumer services into consideration to achieve future business goals. The likes of Google Enterprise Search should help this process.
This represents a major shift in IT development within the business world. Consumer-driven tools and software are some of the most innovative and ground-breaking.
Internal wikis and blogs are already emerging in the business world, and when they can fully integrate with unwieldy CRM systems and complex web analytics packages they’ll become invaluable corporate tools in their own right.
An idea as simple as the tag cloud is a great example. It allows the user to easily assess the content of a body of text, webpage or book. A glance at a cloud of the day’s best-performing shares, or a summary of a competitor’s recent press releases, becomes a fast and convenient way of identifying the information most relevant to you.
These technologies also give the consumer more insight into business than ever before – before I buy your product I might generate a search cloud based on your site which may influence my buying decision.
Innovative tools will continue to be developed in online communities and it is the businesses that first understand the implications and technology that will prosper, not those that attempt to manipulate or interfere, but those who engage and collaborate with their consumers online.
