Ets 2008-01-19 Experton Technology - Web 2.0 Overview

Executive Technology Strategies Research Note January 28, 2008

ETS-2008-01-19

Web 2.0 Overview Recently, we have had a number of clients ask us to present or participate in discussions regarding web 2.0/enterprise 2.0. The following is an overview of the history, technology, and business applicability. Experton Group Opinion: While the consummate technologist is always anxious to use new technology, Experton Group strongly suggests that the client focuses on how to use Web 2.0/ Enterprise 2.0 before they evaluate the technology that is supporting it. There has been a lot of hype around Web 2.0 and as a result, a lot of confusion and misdirection as to the benefits of this new methodology. It is very important to obtain a “big-picture” view before embarking on an enterprise-wide retooling project.

Overview Web 2.0 is a very strong marketing word where every single player in that space has their own definition. O'Reilly came out with the first definition. The table below was taken directly from O’Reilly Publishing and clearly demonstrates the differences between web 1.0 and web 2.01. Web 1.0

1

Web 2.0

DoubleClick

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Google AdSense

Ofoto

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Flickr

Akamai

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BitTorrent

mp3.com

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Napster

Britannica Online

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Wikipedia

personal websites

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blogging

evite

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upcoming.org and EVDB

domain name speculation

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search engine optimization

page views

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cost per click

screen scraping

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web services

publishing

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participation

content management systems

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wikis

directories (taxonomy)

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tagging ("folksonomy")

stickiness

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syndication

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Executive Technology Strategies Research Note Table 1 – Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0

Essentially there are three areas that “define” Web 2.0 and associated technologies: 1. Technology – Made up of a combination of very common internet technology like HTML, Web Services, SOAP, etc., as well as relatively “new” technologies like AJAX and RSS. 2. Business - Within that technology a new set of business models emerged. Google became the archetype of web 2.0. Yahoo, YouTube and many others are taking advantage of this technology. These companies do not rely on the old paradigm; they are giving a lot of their product free, they provide a structure and allow consumers to add their own content, place stuff on web and build communities. The value in that business model is the number of people that are using their infrastructure. While ad revenue is driving a lot of this, there are also other companies that are growing because they have a large community. For example, although YouTube was making no revenue, it was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion since they had a large community. 3. Social Network – In order to understand the nature of social networks, we have to go back to the history of the Internet. In the 1990's the only thing you could do on the Internet was to come onto a website and read information. It was very non-interactive; at that time the user of the internet was only a reader of information. The Internet was termed the “Information Highway”. Then around the year 2000, the Internet evolved to a point where the user became a consumer; where they could go to a specific site and interact (buy) products. The user would review catalogues, order products and pay for products online. The archetype is Amazon. That was an evolution from reader to consumer.

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Executive Technology Strategies Research Note

Now we are at the beginning of a new paradigm where the user is now a producer. Both Myspace and Facebook are the archetypes where the user is able to create their own environment, display their own ID and to add content in their own perspective. This is a place where the user can share their interests with others. We are moving towards that new paradigm where the users are not relying on another company for content. In addition, they are sharing information with others. This is a big evolution. From here we can do also a step-back where now with the internet technology I do not care about the SW or HW, I only need a browser...we do not know (or care) what the underlying technology is...do we have the network capacity between Paris and the states. Technology and usage evolution are two strong evolutions here...

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Executive Technology Strategies Research Note Web 2.0 Principles The principles of web 2.0 leverage information within our community; get the right information and the right people at the same time. 1. Harnessing Collective Intelligence

2. Web as a Platform

5. Rich User Experience

3. Data is the “Intel Inside”

6. S/W Above A Single Device

4. End of the S/W Release Cycle 7. Lightweight Programming Models

Diagram 2 – Seven Web 2.0 Principles Principle 1 – Collective Intelligence We are able to now exploit the intelligence of the community, using the network effect. An example of that network effect is the Lego Company that has taken advantage of this to create a social network of people who were interested in promoting their products. Proctor and Gamble used these types of constructs to enable the exchange of engineering ideas. Some Web 2.0 tools can be used to support the collective intelligence. Wikis are being used instead of traditional publishing media. A Wiki is a place on the internet where anyone can read and contribute. A good example is Wikipedia where everyone is able to update information. This principle is important since we are exploiting the network aspect of Web 2.0. In other words, the principle of Wikipedia is that the truth will come because of the number of people that are using this vehicle. Copyright © 2004-2008 Experton Group, all rights reserved www.experton-group.com Page 4 of 8

Executive Technology Strategies Research Note A Blog is a very simple place or a journal where users can put personal information on the web. The third piece is to be able to retrieve the information via a classification. Instead of having an organization creating taxonomy to classify the information, the user is adding their own personal tags to the information. All the user created tags is called a “folksonomies”. Users place some “tags” on information so that anyone can find theirs and related information. Anyone can place tags and anyone would be able to find the related information. Principle 2 - Web as a platform This is about the importance of the network. We are not talking about hardware and software; we are talking about whether we have the right connection. This is a step further - if we have those connections, the users should be able to create their own websites such as a “mashup” composed of pieces of applications from different websites and merging them to create a new application on the user’s own website. A good example is the Google Map feature that can be used on any website that has a need for maps or geographic features. Principle 3 - Data is the Intel inside Data is what drives the usage. It is important to get the relevant data and make sure that the data has integrity and is of sufficient quality. More important, in these new business models, the most successful companies are the ones that have the more customer data. They can leverage data to cross sell or up sell. For example, Amazon can make recommendations when you buy a product by analyzing the behaviors of others customers that bought the same product. Principle 4 - End Of SW Release Cycles Since user is really a contributor, the impact of releasing new software is negligible. Specifically, if we imbed functionality from another provider, web services eliminate the issues associated with changes since you are only interested with the integrity of the interface. Knowing this, the providers work hard not to change the interface and data schema. Typically, changes to the underlying service will NOT affect the user of that service as long as the interface and the input and output data are not changed. While there is still an inherent risk in the underlying data quality and integrity being suspect, this is not viewed as being a significant risk since the providers know that the data is a critical component of their success.

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Executive Technology Strategies Research Note Principle 5 – Light weight Programming Models. There are several web services that enable the social networking within Web 2.0, such as RSS and SOAP. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to subscribe to feeds so that they will automatically receive information as it becomes available. A RSS system to publish articles and news over the web is simple. On the server, you decide which pages you want to display (the RSS feed). An XML defines the RSS feed and holds URL, title and summary of each page to display. On the consumer computer, a RSS reader is installed and uses the feed address to load the RSS file, then display title and summary. By clicking on a line of the list, the full web page is accessed and displayed on the consumer computer. RSS support is provided by email clients (Outlook, Notes, Thunderbird, etc.) or specific applications available on the Internet. Do others use RSS to tie into their back-end services? No, this is more of a “push” technology, a feed service. RSS is how you create syndicated information service. In order to facilitate transactional traffic you would have to use other web services technology. Principle 6 - Software Above The Level Of A Single Device We are not limited to any PC or IT platform...mobile/phone, etc. Principle 7 - Rich User Experiences While this has nothing to do with web 2.0, it has been a topic that has been raised at the same time as Web 2.0 and therefore is closely associated with it. In this area there are many possibilities on how the rich user experience should be delivered. Let’s highlight three of them. The first view is from Microsoft. The application relies on the Microsoft operating system to manage the user interface. The Windows Presentation Foundation is the graphical subsystem of the .Net 3.0 framework. It provides a clear separation between the business logic and the user interface. It enables to incorporate in the application all the rich control, usability features of the windows platform. The second view is SaaS/Ajax which takes advantage of web services. The rich internet application solves two challenges, HTML and JavaScript are not “rich” enough to support full functionality as Windows and using traditional internet applications there is a lot of interaction between the desktop and server making performance an issue. Ajax solves this problem by changing the interaction from synchronous to asynchronous request-response pairs. With Ajax, we are able to desynchronize the display and the calls for data. This allows us to try and do things in advance before Copyright © 2004-2008 Experton Group, all rights reserved www.experton-group.com Page 6 of 8

Executive Technology Strategies Research Note the user makes requests on the screen. It is often said that Ajax is part of Web 2.0 or required by Web 2.0. Using Ajax, we can do things that are very close to applications developed in a more traditional way. For example, Yahoo mail uses a lot of features in Ajax. Although Ajax is in itself a standard, it has many dialects, therefore it can be hard to debug. There are a lot of Ajax toolkits available. Moving to Ajax is a good idea, but complex. Keep that in mind it can be very timeconsuming. We have to learn the technology in order to exploit or make use of it. Again, it is important to understand that it is only one of many technologies and that Ajax is not an integral part of web 2.0. AJAX uses a combination of technologies including: • eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) for marking up information; • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for styling information; • The document object model (DOM) is accessed with a client-side scripting language, like JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented; • In most cases, the XMLHttpRequest object is used to exchange data asynchronously with the web server; • XML is sometimes used as the format for transferring data between the server and client, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text; • JSON and even EBML. These files may be created dynamically by some form of server-side scripting. The third view is from Adobe, which is based on the assumption that everyone has both Adobe reader and Flash player on their desktops. That is another way to develop rich internet applications on the internet. In terms of how it can be used in your Enterprise; again Web 2.0 has multiple aspects and trends. First you have to determine what you want to do with the social collaboration, rich internet experience, and mashup capabilities. That is the starting point. Next, you must divorce yourself from the marketing hype. Web 2.0 is used more in the consumer market, but there are other aspects of Web 2.0 that can be used in the Enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 is basically how do I use the Web 2.0 technology within my enterprise? How do I enable collaboration with my employees? Projects, interaction with partners, integrate my customer/partner/supplier/employee to create commonality of interest? It is much more a question of business strategy than education.

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Executive Technology Strategies Research Note To add value to the existing business process, you need to make sure that all of the people that have been identified as a part of the project are included. Enterprise 2.0 has been used to obtain feedback from customers. It has also been used to find the right person within the enterprise to solve a particular problem. For example, for years IBM has had their “bluepages” directory where people could find the name, e.mail and phone number of a colleague they knew. Adding information such as group, skills, expertise, employees are now able to identify the “right” expert, even if they don’t know him. We want to see how other corporations have successfully enhanced their business customer and user experiences (using Web 2.0). What can you do to improve service to the customers? What can you do to facilitate interactions with our customers?

The Bottom Line There are many ways you can use Web 2.0. You can use it to publish. You can use Blogs as to capture information from customers; such as being able to start a discussion with your customers about product ideas, service quality, etc. Essentially, you need to think about what you want to do and then address the technological challenges/implementation. The other part of the story is what Enterprise 2.0 is offering. Essentially, this paradigm enables informal social networking within the enterprise. Many prominent enterprises, like IBM, have demonstrated that the ability to conduct impromptu brainstorming and information exchange between “experts” within an enterprise speeds decision-making and increases the knowledge-base within your enterprise.

Additional relevant research is available at www.experton-group.com. Interested readers should contact Experton Group Client Services - [email protected] - to arrange further discussion or an interview About Experton Group Experton Group is the leading fully integrated research, advisory and consulting company for mid-sized and large organizations, maximizing the business value of their ICT investments through innovative, neutral and independent expert advice. Experton Group offers consulting services, market surveys, conferences, seminars and publications related to information and communications technology issues. Our consulting portfolio includes technology, business processes, management and business co-operations, investments and mergers.

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