CIOs look to Web 2.0 collaboration
At a Churchill Club event in San Francisco on July 23, moderator Dave Margulius of Enterprise Insight discussed the current hype surrounding Web 2.0 with panelists Doug Merrill, vice president of engineering at Google, and CIOs David Bergen of Levi Strauss, Doug Schwinn of Hasbro, and Randall Spratt of McKesson.
Instant messaging has been around long before Web 2.0 became a trendy way to describe how people are collaborating and taking advantage of advances in bandwidth, social media and user experience. Blogs and wikis are just beginning to seep into enterprises. Spratt give an example of employees who work from home can feel more connected via IM, blogs and wikis. He also cited improvements in video conferencing as a boon to collaboration and cost savings. Schwinn talked about project teams across the globe collaborating using IM and wikis.
Google's Merrill described Web 2.0 as a label journalists use for companies that "glue themselves together" in a lightweight way, differentiating them from established companies like SAP. He said Google Apps is "sort of a Web 2.0 product."
