Creating the Bridge, and Keeping it Safe

Seems there is a lot in technology news outlets looking at the convergence of Web 2.0 and its infiltration of the Enterprise. Some of it reads as a Sci-Fi thriller, where a traditional society is threatened from within by young collaborators who undermine the status quo. But when you think back about change and its impact on how a business is run, how it does things; well, sometimes it does have an interesting parallel to popular fiction.

There are so many points being discussed about the changing Enterprise and the impact from Web 2.0, incredibly what you read is the inevitability of it; younger employees clamor for effective tools similar to what they find externally. They crave collaboration, and having those tools that allows them to shape information as they need only helps the bottom line. That is the overall premise in an article from Network World with various experts citing examples of such use today. I particularly like David Boloker, CTO of emerging Internet technologies at IBM, example:

…the Bloomberg.com trading application, for example, is a mash-up already deployed for business purposes that makes the trader merely "a masher-up of information,” he says.

That may be the case but the trader might have a thought or two on this description. Nevertheless, the overall point one has to concede is that individual employees are constantly seeking information in forms that often their business is not able to provide, or often willing. The traditional perspective is that an application is done to do a particular job and an employee should use it that way. But in an Enterprise 2.0 strategy, the opportunity is presented that allows employees to take various information streams and create the combinations they need in order to generate a result – ideally.

Because such mashups can result in a myriad of information exchanges, businesses have to be worried about how to keep some controls in place. Boloker goes on to say

Specifications for securing mash-ups, as well as accessing and collecting widgets on a single Web page, could come as soon as the first quarter of 2008, Boloker says. Enterprises might welcome the speed because adoption of Web 2.0 could force them to reevaluate their security policies and practices…

A hint of things to come from IBM…possibly, but in the end, I think Boloker is hinting at that inevitability; that clients of companies such as IBM are now realizing the need of such a strategy, and are keen to get solutions in place. Therefore, it’s a mad dash to create the right solution that can meet that need as quickly as possibly. The next few months will certainly be an interesting time when we’ll see new solutions and offerings enter the market to meet this unrequited need.