Dion Hinchcliffe on leveraging the convergence of IT and the next generation of the Web.
Dion Hinchcliffe is an expert in information technology, business strategy, and next-generation enterprises.
My posts recently about Web 2.0 becoming a true application development platform, and one that's mostly programmed by users, generated some interesting feedback on its own. But what was more interesting was a lot of parallel discussion in the industry as others notice the same thing.
My previous post discussed how IBM is planning to use Web 2.0 software like wikis as a foundation upon which to build so-called situational software. These are instant applications which can be assembled just-in-time (and not created from scratch) from the rich pallette of services and feeds available on the Web and in the enterprise. They are situational because they can be created right as the situation they are needed for appears, and even thrown away when the reason for their existence goes away.
ZDNet blog colleague Joe McKendrick beat me to the punch earlier this week with an excellent analysis of the fascinating ramifications of IBM's recent statements at the New York PHP Conference aimed mainstreaming mashup and Web 2.0 technologies. If IBM is getting seriously involved in this, there must be something to it, and certainly Rod Smith's comments are receiving considerable attention.
ZDNet blogger Richard MacManus wrote a good post late yesterday about the significant release of eBay's new community wiki pages, likely the largest commercial wiki effort to date. But eBay is almost certainly just one of an early beachhead of corporate wiki efforts that will attempt to use wikis to create better overall customer service experiences for their users, suppliers, and partners. Not leveraging the contributions of a company's most impassioned and enthusiastic customers is starting to be seen as an significant oversight in many business circles.
Harvard Business School's Andrew McAfee has been doing a compelling job lately describing the use of Web 2.0-style collaboration techniques in the enterprise. He calls this Enterprise 2.0 and has been reporting a very positive response to these concepts in the famed business school's most senior executive education program.
David Boloker, CTO for Emerging Internet Technology at IBM and one of the spearheads behind the OpenAjax Alliance, gave a presentation today at Real-World Ajax here in New York City summarizing the organization's accomplishments over the last few months. Ostensibly formed to ensure the Ajax market doesn't fragment into incompatible toolkits, standards, and approaches, the initiative seems to have matured considerably into a detailed strategy for making Ajax a capable new Web platform for online software.
Peter Rip of Leapfrog Ventures did a really good take recently on what Web 2.0 will look like in the enterprise. I bring your attention to it because it brings out a few essential points and almost makes a few others I think are still missing in the larger industry conversation about Web 2.0 and its increasing push into the enterprise.
Interesting information from Gartner's recent Symposium/ITxpo about the future of IT continues to be the subject discussion in the blogosphere. While I'm far from being an unabashed Gartner fan, I will admit they tend to capture of the pulse of the IT business better than almost anybody these days. Their most recent prescription for curing IT budget woes (which have been relatively flat for four years running) describes nine major initiatives that could alleviate this situation. And it is also one of their more interesting information releases in recent memory.
The REST vs. SOAP debate can seem like an esoteric discussion about Web services, but it's not. REST puts the Web back into Web services by taking what's been so successful with the fundamental protocol of the Web, namely HTTP, and making it into a seemingly ideal Web services architecture. This model has been called Web-Oriented Architecture in certain quarters, and the label does seem to fit. REST, and it's little brother XML over HTTP, have increasingly gathered mindshare lately by sheer Darwinian competition.
I was in San Francisco last week at JavaOne at the same time that Gartner's IT/Symposium was taking place, though I was unable to attend Gartner's event. I was however on a JavaOne panel that discussed Ajax, SOA, and Web 2.0, the convergence of the latter two in particular which is a topic of special interest to me.