WEB 2.0

Over the last month I have been reading a lot about WEB 2.0 and in particular references to WEB 2.0 in the enterprise. I first started reading about this because I questioned the adoption of WEB 2.0 technologies in the enterprise and I wanted to see if there was a trend to enterprise adoption. As a technology manager responsible for infrastructure resources, understanding these technologies and where they can be applied is critical to my success.

The O'Rielly site and Wikipedia are good starting points for those folks trying to understand WEB 2.0. Dion Hinchcliffe's WEB 2.0 blog and his Enterprise Web 2.0 blog at ZDnet goes beyond the concepts of WEB 2.0 to how it will impact the business.

Here is my meager definition of Web 2.0......

Web 2.0 is a architecture and a shift in how individuals, companies, and enterprises communicate and share knowledge and resources on intra-nets and on the INTERNET. It is more user and community centric with more feedback built into the apps and has a richer dynamic web interface with robust features like tagging and dynamic data gathering.

There are a number of companies experimenting with and deploying Web 2.0 technologies today, however it's adoption appears to be geared to the customer level of applications as opposed to a across the board architectural deployment.

If your business rely heavily on Internet based traffic then it makes a lot of sense to look at these technologies, however inside the firewall at the enterprise level, your Customer Service and Intra-net applications are good choices, however your Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and Claims Processing applications are not good choices. Applications with tight data and security requirements are not good candidates, as WEB 2.0 technologies are much more open then typical WEB 1.0 or Client Server based applications.

To answer my original question, I do see a trend in the adoption of WEB 2.0 technologies in the Enterprise, however in my opinion, a full adoption will not happen until we can integrate enterprise level security into the openness of WEB 2.0.