Many traditional businesses that stand to benefit from
the new business processes, communities and business models enabled
by the Web 2.0 movement will miss out because they simply do not
realise its long-term business potential, analyst Gartner has
warned.
“For some it’s simply a case of once bitten, twice shy,” said
Gartner analyst Charles Abrams. “Massive investments during the
first internet revolution proved unprofitable for many enterprises,
and they are nervous of making the same mistakes again.”
Abrams said many traditional enterprises viewed Web 2.0 as
purely a technological phenomenon.
“What they fail to see is that, unlike Web 1.0, success with Web
2.0 depends less on new and untested technology investments, and
more on reaping the power of new forms of business models, newly
enabled online communities and collaborative processes.”
He said the risk with Web 2.0 “has more to do with ignoring the
easy-win business benefits that can be gained once the relevant
applications and platforms are in place”.
Gartner also said there was a mistaken perception that the
transformational technologies associated with Web 2.0, such as Ajax
or RSS, were primarily consumer-facing and would therefore fail to
meet the stability, reliability and security requirements of
corporate IT.
The analyst listed seven core benefits of Web 2.0 for
businesses:
1 Core enterprise applications will become more
effective through the incorporation of Web 2.0 technologies.
2 Next-generation web platforms can be highly
efficient in overall procurement and sales strategies.
3 Lessons from Web 2.0 community and social
networking success stories can be used within the enterprise for
more efficient knowledge worker collaboration and overall employee
satisfaction.
4 Semantic tagging technologies can greatly
increase the navigation of internal and external information
overload and increase information-based product consumption and
use.
5 Web 2.0 communities can be used for new product
feedback, shortening product development time and targeting
valuable marketing resources.
6 Targeting bloggers and other influential web
users can help an organisation to control its image and generate
positive publicity.
7 Making web-based marketing the norm, rather than
the exception, will help optimise overall marketing spend.