A new form of obsessive compulsive disorder is
afflicting the workplace. You may have noticed that some employees
begin to twitch and jitter if they have not checked Facebook in the
past 10 minutes. But although the social networking craze has
reached epidemic proportions, the chief executive is more likely to
wonder if the much-hypedWeb 2.0can bolster the
books.
As with the with dotcom era, the flannel surrounding
Web 2.0 can obscure any vision of how it can help a business
achieve its goals.
According to Jeffrey Hammond, senior analyst with Forrester, Web
2.0 technology offers big rewards. These include "committed
customers, more productive employees, and empowered communities
that increase the rate of innovation around corporate assets such
as products and historical data".
This all sounds good, but perhaps a little vague. When people
think of Web 2.0, they are most likely to think of
Facebook, Myspace and various blogging sites. Oliver Young, an
analyst with Forrester, says these preconceptions of the uses of
Web 2.0 have prevented some people in business from exploiting its
power.
"There is scepticism across the board. Most people's
understanding of it comes from the consumer world, where blogs are
a personal diary, and not business related. That gives people the
wrong starting point when it comes to thinking about these tools in
the enterprise, so they think they are not applicable to business,"
he says.
So what is Web 2.0? Many observers are sceptical that Web 2.0 is
anything different to what has come before, or is definable at all.
The father of the World Wide Web,
Tim
Berners-Lee, says the term
Web 2.0 is "a piece of jargon".
Yet it has become ubiquitous enough to take on a life of its
own, with two prominent aspects. First is the social-networking
side, exemplified by the popularity of Facebook and Myspace, each
of which boasts tens of millions of users. Blogs and wikis form a
part of Web 2.0, and these are often called "user generated
content".
Some businesses are succeeding by weaving these ideas into their
online strategy. ArenaFlowers.com, a firm selling and delivering
flowers online, uses blogs to improve the site's ranking on
internet searches. Sam Barton, head of design and development at
the firm, says nearly 30% of the site's traffic comes from
searches. "The blog is a key part of that, but they have to be from
the heart and be real, so users engage with them. However, we do
not miss a trick in making sure they link back to the site."
The second broad area of Web 2.0 is the technical side. New
technologies have allowed a richer, more interactive experience of
the internet. These include Ajax, which is a group of related
web-development techniques used for creating interactive web
applications using Javascript and XML. These techniques can help
applications "talk" to one another online, giving developers the
opportunity to aggregate application data into a single online
interface. This so-called "mashup" approach is what allows Google's
map application to turn up on a commerce site and combine with
propriety information. For example, online travel firm Opodo
combines holiday and flight availability with Google maps in the
EscapeMap feature of its
website.
One firm seeking to take advantage of the new richness of the
internet interface afforded by these technologies is Brighter
Business, an insurance firm targeting SMEs.
It uses the service oriented architecture concept to combine its
richer web interface with its business applications. Rob Jordan,
head of technology at Brighter Business, says that despite the
complexity of business insurance the system allows them to offer
more than 60 dynamic, industry-specific question sets and 12 types
of insurance cover.
Working with Edge IPK, an internet software and consultancy
firm, Bright Business was able to offer intelligent forms that
tailored questions in response to information already given. "We
were able to hide questions that were not relevant and reveal only
the relevant ones and do it in a smooth way. Ajax allowed us to
offer this smoother experience," Jordan said.
The "call me back" button allows customers to talk to advisers
about their cover with having to re-enter any data, improving
conversion of website visits into sales, Jordan says.
The system will now allow their insurance quote application to
be combined with other websites offering services to small
businesses. Brighter Business is already in discussion with a
number of channels and partners, Jordan says.
Although adding social networking to the site is further away,
Jordan says the idea has potential in gaining loyalty of a small
business customer base. "Word of mouth is very effective in the SME
market, and we are looking at social networking to capture that,
although we have nothing specific planned at the moment."
Selling the concept of Web 2.0 with ArenaFlowers.com and
Brighter Business was not such a challenge for the IT teams
involved because commerce was part of these companies' plans from
the offset.
However, older, more established businesses are also getting
into Web 2.0. Law Firm Reynolds Porter Chamberlain has used these
technologies to create an subscription-based extranet that also
allows its lawyers to update information on a peer-to-peer
basis.
Prompted by a new Financial Services Authority (FSA) directive
that determines that insurers and their clients should have better
knowledge of the contract before cover starts, Reynolds Porter
Chamberlain, with the help of RedDot, a provider of enterprise
content management systems, has built an extranet that attaches
commercial and legal case history to clauses within insurance
contracts. This is kept up-to-date by Reynolds Porter Chamberlain
lawyers and helps insurers, lawyers and re-insurers more
efficiently assess risk before contracts are signed.
Since the extranet went live in January 2007, 17 subscribing
companies have already signed up for the service, and more than 100
individual users are benefiting from its services.
Julie Berry, IT director at RPC, says, "The lawyers add to the
content themselves, because we did not want a system where IT had
to become involved."
The Web 2.0 system was easy to sell to the business because the
idea came from a senior partner, although it was not expressed in
the Web 2.0 lingo. "Nine out of ten times, the way we deliver
systems starts with [the business] saying what they need."
Although Berry saw great potential for expanding social
networking within the legal profession, it must overcome some
barriers before it is accepted. "Lawyers are very intelligent
people and they like to create and come up with ideas themselves,
so discussion and networking is very good. However, there are legal
obligations to make sure are sourcing the right information from
the right person. It is not as it in education where people come up
with and share ideas. In law there is a risk of getting sued: there
is a right way and a wrong way and people can claim against you if
you get it wrong."
Forrester's Oliver Young, says the best way to get a business
case together for a Web 2.0 project is to start small. "Some of
these technologies require large investments, others may have more
targeted deployment," he says. "A wiki can be valuable to just two
people, whereas social networking might need the whole company on
board, so it is more difficult and costly.
"Look for targeted deployment. Use software that is cheap, open
source or comes as a service. Start with a defined problem you want
to fix. If you solve it, then you have a business case, if not,
then you have not wasted much."
IT departments can start by experimenting on themselves, he
says. "Wikis can be useful for project management or helpdesk
issues. You can then look for similar issues in the business to use
the same tools for, or publicise your success and wait for them to
come to you. You might have people beating down the door. It can
start to snow-ball."
The technology can be applicable to very different business
problems. Although it can make a general contribution to
productivity, it is not easy to see how it helps the top line or
revenue growth, Young says.
"The metrics can be across the board, but if you are looking for
hard return on investment it can be difficult to measure. But it is
worth keeping in mind that the return does not need to be so big if
the investment is very small."
Any IT directors who believe they can ignore Web 2.0 should
think again, Young says. For now, Web 2.0 will offer advantage, but
in the longer term it will become engrained business tools just
like e-mail is today.
Selling the business benefits of Web 2.0
According to the Forrester paper
Social Computing
Dresses Up For Business published in September last year,
enterprise Web 2.0 can improve five important activities that every
business does on a regular basis.
- Content creation and publishing. Web 2.0 technologies allow
faster, richer, and more collaborative content creation, as well as
simple tools and processes for publishing content. Blogs and wikis
improve how people collaborate, because content creation, editing,
approval, publishing, and management can all take place within the
same application.
- Team co-ordination. Using the multi-editor capabilities in
wikis, people can add basic structure and use the tool as a simple
team workspace. This is more structured than sending file
attachments through e-mail and is more accessible than traditional
team spaces like Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus QuickPlace.2
- Proactive information delivery. RSS feeds allow people to pull
in the information they deem relevant to their job, whether from
enterprise applications or external sources.
- Information location. As with Del.icio.us on the public
internet, tagging provides the ability to mark the location of
information as with a bookmark. In business, tagging allows a piece
of content to be marked multiple times providing multiple paths to
find the information later. Over time, content can be defined by
the tags assigned to it, and tag clouds can be generated that
provide a visual indication of the subject matter that people can
use to quickly and easily establish context and relevancy.
- Communities of interest. Building communities of interest and
practice to improve learning and innovation across departmental,
geographic, and hierarchical boundaries is one of the key benefits
Web 2.0 brings to a large organisation. Public-facing technologies
like Facebook have proved effective at building communities of
interest and similar functionality help business.