As you’ve probably heard, the Web progressed to version 2.0 a couple of years ago. It’s about time, too, especially since for many of us, our maintenance contracts with the Web were about to run out, and we didn’t want to have to pay for the upgrade to the new version. Fortunately, the new release of the Web went smoothly. We downloaded the new software, followed the upgrade instructions (did you remember to download the new drivers first?), and were up and running with our brand new Web version within days.
The only problem is that, while the Web may have progressed to 2.0, businesses are stuck at 1.5, at best. As they try to grab hold of the bubble, businesses are finding they’re weighted down. Not by extraneous baggage they could jettison, but by core principles of organization and operation.
Take an easy part of Web 2.0: User participation via blogging. For now, we’ll ignore that the Web has been about user participation from its very beginning. There’s no question that blogging has made it easier than ever for people to join the global conversation. There’s obviously no technical reason why a corporation couldn’t start up its own blogs, and many have. But so often corporate blogs are the worst sort of marketing: marketing pretending that it isn’t marketing.
If you wanted to build an environment in which blogging would be tempted to betray its values, you’d build a modern corporation. Marketing has trained companies to speak in safe platitudes. Legal has warned companies not to let anyone speak without permission. Executives have let themselves believe that they got where they are because they’re oh so fascinating. It’s a miracle there are any good corporate blogs at all.
Or take mashups, the poster children of Web 2.0. Sure, companies may use other people’s data to enhance their own, and if a page isn’t busily rebuilding itself through the magic of AJAX, then it definitely hasn’t drunk the Web 2.0 juice. The real question is whether a company will let others use its data. We’ve told companies for a generation now that information is their second most important asset. But, in the 2.0 world, information is free to roam, mate, and produce unexpected offspring. Most companies aren’t ready to go that far, so they point to how they’ve mashed up their store locations with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Maps, and declare Web 2.0 victory.
It’s not easy. I know a company that is about to do some deals to aggregate a particular class of information. I’m not allowed to give away details, so let’s pretend it’s information about auto repairs. (It’s not.) There are several coalitions proposing standards in this area, all aiming at openness. This company doesn’t want to play. They have an opportunity to become the dominate source for auto repair info, and they don’t want to give up their control over the standard they may be in a position to establish as the de facto winner.
I think it’s short-sighted of them for good business reasons. Because an open standard would encourage innovation and competition, the market will eventually (probably) push for it and thus push away from this company’s proprietary standard. I’ve lost this argument, though, because the company looks at the shorter-term future and sees lots of advantages. Immediate gain in the 1.5 world weighs quite heavily against long-term benefit in the 2.0 world.
The fact that companies are stalled at Enterprise 1.5 isn’t due to a simple failing, as if they’re just not as smart as the Web 2.0 hackers. Web 2.0 sharpens the challenge Web 1.0 posed to our traditional ways of doing business. The change is deep and real. We should expect business to lag, and some businesses to be left behind entirely.
— David Weinberger, Technologist and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto
Another thought about this--step back from Web 1.0, Web 2.0, or Web 1.5. Business objectives should drive the applications. It's good for me to know mash-ups exist and I sort of know how they work, but if I push an IT person to create a mash-up for mash-up's sake, I've missed the point.
For me, understanding the different new web applications is key and I'm surprised our IT group hasn't been doing that. I enjoy following technological trends, but in a perfect world, I would be supported by an IT group that understands my business needs and technological capabilities so well that they would be pushing me with applications. That's not the case, and I think that's a common situation for others elsewhere.
I think the potential slowness of adoption in the Enterprise is more of a symptom of IT groups not understanding the business drivers. Back in the day, it wasn't the IT group that was driving development of web sites, either, but rather the business side creating application requirements. So, come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be that suprising that IT groups aren't pushing these new tools.
Conversely, the business pushing adoption of a capability just because others are using it is a non-starter. That's why we ended up with so many corporate blogs from marketing VPs that spoke to no one.
In the end, maybe the observation that things are at 1.5 is fair, but that they are stuck at 1.5 might not be. Both IT and the business side may need some prodding to determine if there is potential for new tools to drive results. But achieving some results at 1.0 or 1.5 is probably better than 2.0 adoption with no linkage to results.
Web 2.0 is not just Ajax tools for speeding up interaction without requiring a page load. The point David and most of the commenters are making is that the Web as a medium for culture (business and society-wide) growth, like agar jelly as a medium for culturing bread mold is leading to the emergence of (business) forms with previously unknown and comparatively miraculous properties - i.e. penicillin.
Okay, I admit it, I'm someone who believes that torture in the name of understanding is worth the cost. (Torture, that is, of metaphors.)
As David (Cluetrain: "markets are conversations") W. says, new enabling technologies enable more than quantitative (Ajax level) changes. These are qualitative -- disruptive innovation level changes. Directed evolution of bacteria rather than single pathway targeted antibiotics.
Not just the flu for a miserable week, but pandemics.
(Okay, just like real-world torture, tortured metaphors generally don't actually produce reliable results.)
I have seen businesses that haven't heard of the term 2.0 and yet are at the forefront of many of 2.0 innovations. However, most enterprises don't have an Information Culture; rather they are stuck in their insular ways of doing things and are happy with it. 2.0 can be nerve wrecking to a manager who wants to shield his team from criticism and yet wants to keep a safe image in the organization. Leaders want to control when and where the information travels, for in the darkness of secrecy fans the light of survival.2.0 is a collective evolution and you will always see businesses lagging behind in a capitalistic economy - for safety assumes paramount to good deeds.
Yep of course...the whole mess is pretty fractal and we'll find enlightened and endarkened zones in any sample of the system...
As long as corporations are legally bolted to the "return profit to shareholders" rule, and as long as profit is digitally defined with market money, it seems hard to imagine how the short-term vs long-term arguments can be tipped towards more far sighted behaviours. There's a constantly decreasing latency in money/profit flows...(thanks to networked machines!) so the poor human managers are left with little to do other than preen their blogs.
Those pockets of contratrians you refer to, don't they represent a persistent phenom: like an eddy in an otherwise smooth flow?
Imagine if the situation we thus: corporations almost uniformly updated themselves according to the latest toolsets. And of course the mortality rate was quite high (and normative) since supdating to the bleeding edge implies living in a zone with much higher failure rates.
But here and there in the corporatezoo we could see a couple of contrarian actors, companies and teams that had slow uptake rates, and as a result suffered lower normative mortality, but also suffered a few casualities because they were left behind.
Would we write articles lauding them for their laggardliness trhe same as we now laud those few daring, agile companies that wholeheartedly suck up the next big thing?
From a whole systems perspective, it seems natural that there is a distribution across the curve of rate of uptake, with normative values pretty much the hidden factor.
I wonder what the normative rate of change was for your average London Trading House, c1830? Perhaps our modern corps are already steroid-fueled change junkies and we've just gotten numb to it all?
I wonder if it will be quite as binary as that. After all, within even
staid corporations there often are pockets and pools of people
collaborating on projects in a 2.0 sort of way. Management may think
that these pools are motivated by money and the inspirational rantings
of the CEO, but they are really inspired by one another and by the work
they're doing. So maybe the evolution will be patchier and at a finer
level of granularity. Or maybe not....
Your finger is on the pulse again... if, as you say, Web2 sharpens the point of the web, then I'd say NGN (Web3) is going to be a full-scale hatchet job.
The info-sharing proposition we put forward in the F/OSS community is easy to grasp and many of us sing the mantra without critique. There is a kernel of enlightened self-interest that makes sense to an individual, but rarely to an organisation.
I believe you are highlighting the problem of enlightening organisations. NGN is going to make it very clear which organisations are hiding behind old value equations (like your auto parts org) and which ones have committed to next-generation wealth creation.
This will be like an evolutionary tree split in the taxonomy of organisations...and it's not a question of more or less "advanced"...like any evolutionary gambit, it's a matter of being "fit for purpose" in a big, dynamic, and unpredictable environment.
Take your chances on the evolutionary branch of your choosing and let the chips fall where they may!
Historically, it seems like the more established businesses—whether they’re large or small large—always suffer from the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” attitude towards new technology. They prefer to save money by continuing to use legacy systems rather than spend money upgrading. You can’t blame them for thinking about their bottom line.
It’s usually the younger companies or risk-taking entrepreneurs that see the light and consider the benefits of Web 2.0—whether it’s online advertising, collaboration, social networking, or what have you. For them, investing in Web 2.0 technologies is a better choice than the risk of becoming static.
I agree with your thoughts on this. But, I also have to wonder, if people just don't get update weary. Even if it is something that has not needed it in a very long time, so much else needs updating every 5 minutes (ok...exaggeration but it seems so), that after a while, you just think, oh, not again, and walk away shaking your head.
Or, you have the "everything was OK until I did my update" scenario. Where after you did the "much needed, very necessary" update, nothing worked correctly again, then you had to find the bug. I've had that happen more than once. And it can be enough to make you dread (and avoid) the next update that hits you in the face.
Most for-profit businesses are focused on immediate and short-term performance. Owners and shareholders tend to insist on that. So far, companies that have taken a longer-term view and have preemptively cannibalized their existing revenues haven't met with a whole lot of short-term success.
I also think that the move is slow because people don't want to open up their information insecurely. I am sure we can all name atleast three instances of data loss in the past year. Because of these risks I think many businesses are opting to maintain the status quo.
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