More organizations shift to Web 2.0 while IT departments remain wary
A couple of recent announcements from two large, very well-known organizations provides an interesting data point on how Web 2.0 is affecting the product designs and business processes of otherwise very traditional institutions. Both USA Today and the U.S. Patent and Trademark office have recently unveiled strategies for letting their users use two-way Web capabilities to contribute directly to the products and services they offer. And many other mainstream companies, such as Pepsi as well as GM and XM Radio have been exploring externally-facing Web 2.0 concepts in their products for a while now.
This means that if you get an employee to spend an hour to contribute to an internal Web 2.0 application, that's an hour of their regular work that doesn't get done.At the same time, a recent InformationWeek survey of IT departments are showing considerably wariness for doing the same thing inside the firewall with employees, with over half being either skeptical or wary of the utility of Web 2.0 apps in the enterprise. The biggest concerns: Security, little expertise with Web 2.0 products, integration issues, and unclear ROI top the list. In other words, the group inside most organizations that's most familiar with IT and software, is thinking carefully before deploying things like Enterprise 2.0.
This is an interesting contrast, with a growing list of companies cautiously but clearly testing out the Web 2.0 waters with their customers while remaining largely on the fence for its use inside the enterprise. Certainly, many organizations likely believe that consumer facing sites that extensively leverage user generated content, mass participation, and social networking have been proved to work on a large scale by sites like MySpace and YouTube. And that organizations have already purchased and deployed countless IT tools that were already designed support internal business processes, ad hoc collaboration, and information capture and storage.
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How about it? For traditional businesses, will Web 2.0 capabilities offered to public actually get ahead of internal Enterprise 2.0 deployments in the near term?
