Dion Hinchcliffe

Contributor

Dion Hinchcliffe is an expert in information technology, business strategy, and next-generation enterprises. He is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research as well as Chief Strategy Officer at 7Summits. A veteran of ente…rprise IT, Dion has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to bridge the widening gap between business and technology. He has extensive practical experience with enterprise technologies and he consults, advises, and writes prolifically on social business, IT, and enterprise architecture. Dion still works in the trenches with clients in the Fortune 1000, government, and Internet startup community. He is also a sought-after keynote speaker and is co-author of several books on 2.0 subjects including Web 2.0 Architectures from O'Reilly as well as the best-selling Social Business By Design from John Wiley & Sons (May, 2012.)

Dion's Current and Past Clients: AIIM, AOL, Alcatel-Lucent, Best Buy, CBS Interactive, JackBe ING, Intuit, Microsoft, Nexplore, Qualcomm, T. Rowe Price, Techweb, The World Bank, 1105 Media Reply Italy, O'Reilly Media, LG CNS, LMI, Accenture, 2BeWise, 4Sports LLC, Gucci, IBM, Incubeta, Kapow Technologies, Mansueto Digital, Near-Time, nGenera, Swisscom, Sys-Con, Viscape, Coca-Cola, McKinsey & Company, Hasbro, CDW, IDG

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A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise

A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise

For well over a year now we've seen reports and announcements from a major industry analyst firms and others tracking the movement of Web 2.0 ideas into the enterprise. Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, and many others have all weighed in on the trends or made recommendations, sometimes cautious and sometimes optimistic, that organizations should start heading down the Web 2.0 path. And public interest in Web 2.0 in the enterprise is widespread too, not in the least exemplified by the fact that Web 2.0 trends of all kinds -- business and consumer both -- are tracked closely here in many blogs on ZDNet. The big question? What do you really need to know today about Web 2.0 in the enterprise?

July 26, 2007 by in Enterprise Software

A bumper crop of new mashup platforms

A bumper crop of new mashup platforms

While application developers tend to roll their eyes at the concept of end-user mashups, they remain one of the more promising new trends in software development this year. And while it's certainly true it's early days yet for mashups, the tools that enable them remaining rather limited, seems to be changing as I regularly come across compelling new mashup platforms as well as upgrades to existing ones that show what will be possible soon. And for now, as evidenced recently in the McKinsey Web 2.0 in business survey where 21% of organizations globally said they are using or planning to use mashups, there appears to be considerable demand for mashups at the enterprise level even though the majority of existing offerings are primarily aimed at the consumer space. Is this disconnect resolving with the current crop of offerings? Let's take a look.

July 22, 2007 by in Enterprise Software

Mashups: The next major new software development model?

Mashups: The next major new software development model?

At last week's Mashup Ecosystem Summit held in San Francisco and sponsored by IBM with an invited assemblage of leading players in this space, I gave an opening talk about the current challenges and opportunities of mashups. And there I posed the title of this post as a statement instead of a question. The reason that it's a question here is entirely driven by the context of who is currently creating the majority of mashups these days. Because even a cursory examination of what people are doing every day on the Web right now tells us that mashups -- also known as ad hoc Web sites created on the fly out of other Web sites -- are indeed happening in a large way, albeit in simple forms, by the tens of thousands online every day.

May 14, 2007 by in Enterprise Software

Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst

Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst

I've only recently had a chance to catch up and read Tom Davenport's post a few weeks ago about his skepticism of Enterprise 2.0's ability to wreak significant cultural and hierarchical change inside organizations. Those of you tracking the Enterprise 2.0 story know the drill, namely that applying Web 2.0 tools and platforms inside organization may or may not -- depending on who you are talking to -- improve the way we collaborate, run our businesses, and even potentially tap major new veins of previously unexploitable worker productivity. I myself tend to be a bit biased because I'm very close to many uses of these technologies and their use in the field. And that's shown me that if one trend stands out clearly above the fray, it's that most organizations are rapidly embracing these tools today, either from the top-down or at a grassroots level, and often both.

May 5, 2007 by in Enterprise Software

Encouraging Enterprise 2.0: As simple as possible, but no simpler?

Encouraging Enterprise 2.0: As simple as possible, but no simpler?

Blogger Euan Semple recently highlighted a key point about Enterprise 2.0 adoption that ZDNet's own Dan Farber also found worthy of note over the weekend. And that is that Enterprise 2.0 will happen in your organization entirely by itself, whether you encourage it, discourage it, or even consign it to benign neglect. Euan actually laid out three strategies in semi-tongue cheek form likely meant as a shot across the bow of complacent IT departments; whether you get out of the way, actively encourage it, or do absolutely nothing, Enterprise 2.0 platforms like blogs, wikis, and related social, emergent, freeform Web 2.0-style apps are coming to your company, and in fact are almost certainly there already.

March 12, 2007 by in Enterprise Software

A tale of two Web 2.0 conferences and mashups

A tale of two Web 2.0 conferences and mashups

I've just come off a whirlwind conference tour that started in San Francisco last week with Web 2.0 Expo and ended with the Web 2.0 Kongress yesterday in Frankfurt. I was fortunate enough to be able to speak at both conferences and it was fascinating to see the differences in focus between the two events, as well as some of the apparent trends they had in common.

April 27, 2007 by in Enterprise Software

A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise, Part 2

A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise, Part 2

A new survey of the personal use of Web 2.0 applications by CIOs emerged late last week and provided another interesting, if high-level, datapoint about the future of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Carried out by CIO Insight, the survey reported the usual trends like high rates of use of wikis, blogs, and RSS, as well as a few unexpected outliers, like 39% of CIOs listen to podcasts.

August 27, 2007 by in Enterprise Software

The 10 top challenges facing enterprise mashups

The 10 top challenges facing enterprise mashups

The promise of remixing existing online services and data into entirely new online applications in a rapid, inexpensive manner, often referred to as mashups, has captured the software industry's imagination since the release of first major example, HousingMaps.com, in early 2005. Since then, mashups have offered the potential to finally make widespread software reuse a reality, enable SOA initiatives to achieve positive ROI, and radically drive down the cost of application development while satisfying large applications backlogs that plague organizations almost everywhere.

October 16, 2007 by in Enterprise Software

Significant workplace inroads for Enterprise 2.0?

Significant workplace inroads for Enterprise 2.0?

According to a random poll I recently conducted on Facebook, just over a quarter of 300 respondents -- 27% of them in all -- answered in the affirmative that they are provided with an easy way at work to post on a blog or put information on a wiki. I often ask this same question to gatherings of people whenever I get the chance these days and have been getting roughly the same answer for the last few months. Businesses are apparently starting taking Web 2.0 for a serious spin.

October 30, 2007 by in Enterprise Software

2007: The year enterprises open their SOAs to the Internet?

2007: The year enterprises open their SOAs to the Internet?

Those that follow the trends on the Internet and the trends within the enterprise have long noticed a very similar direction in both spaces for a while now; a push to move their software to a real services model. The reasons for this push seem straightforward: easier integration between systems, a better foundation for building new applications, dynamic business process automation that crosses organizational boundaries, and better management and monitoring of IT systems.

January 5, 2007 by in Enterprise Software