Web 2.0 Technology Driven 8 Business Trends

An enterprise create real wealth by combining technology with innovative ways of doing busines.This is what came out in The McKinsey Quarterly which identified 8 unique business trends empowered by the Web 2.0 technology in its article " “Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch”..

McKinsey’s Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch

• ‘Distributing co-creation’: "Technology now allows companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders—cocreation—in essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control."
• ‘Using consumers as innovators’: "Consumers increasingly want to engage online with one another and with organizations of all kinds. Companies can tap this new mood of customer engagement for their economic benefit."
• ‘Tapping into the world of talent’: "As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence."
• ‘Extracting more value from interactions’: "...a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions, "which will be core to the workforce by 2015.
• ‘Expanding the frontiers of automation’: "organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What’s more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service."
• ‘Unbundling production from delivery’: "Use these technologies to offer other companies—suppliers, customers, and other ecosystem participants—access to parts of their IT architectures through standard protocols”.
• ‘Putting more science into management’: "The quality and quantity of information available to any business will continue to grow explosively as the costs of monitoring and managing processes fall......Information is often power; broadening access and increasing transparency will inevitably influence organizational politics and power structures."
• ‘Making business from information’: "Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities."

So, "creative leaders can use a broad spectrum of new, technology-enabled options to craft their strategies." Apply these trends in a wide variety of businesses, and be the winner.

Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

AJAX, Enterprise Mashups, and SOA

According to JSON inventor andYahoo! Architect Douglas Crockford, one of the things that AJAX has enabled is mashups, which he boldly calls "the most interesting innovation in software development in at least 20 years."To him,"mashups are the fulfillment of the promise of competent architecture and highly reusable modules”, offering “a whole new class of interactivity and value”.

Mashups originate with Web 2.0, which epitomizes development on the fly. With the rediscovery of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology and the mushrooming popularity of rich Internet applications, we now have the ability to create mashups that quickly solve business problems by using the standard dynamic interfaces that front services. Mashups provide a quick and easy way to solve many of today’s simple business problems — and should scale nicely to solve more complex and far-reaching problems in the future. Now-a-days, more and more enterprises are looking into how they can benefit from mashups to improve their business.

With the increasing use of mushups, “the line is blurring between the enterprise and the Web. However, mashups live on that porous perimeter, offering the reusability of an SOA plus very rapid development using prebuilt services outside the firewall. Soon, we may live in a world where it’s difficult to tell where the enterprise stops and the Web begins. It’s scary — and exciting at the same time,” says Dave Linthicum, a blogger in InfoWorld.

More complex mashups move toward composite applications - made up of many services, which is an advanced SOA concept. And, enterprises should be prepared properly to leverage mushups for their business growth. In this context, it is better advisable that the enterprises need “to design and deploy an SOA with mushups in mind”. He further adds, “mashup preparation can be divided into six familiar stages: requirements, design, governance, security, deployment, and testing. These are core architectural bases you must touch if you are to arrive safely in the promised land of mashups on top of an SOA.” They make the value of an SOA much more visible over a much shorter term.

Now, we are in 2008, and we need to first know a few critical questions to ask next about AJAX, Web 2.0,RIA (Rich Internet Applications),Mushups, and then look for their answers. Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! Douglas Crockford, creator of JSON; Coach Wei, founder and CTO of Nexaweb; Chris Schalk, developer evangelist for Google; John Crupi, CTO of JackBe; Joshua Gertzen, lead developer of the ThinWire AJAX Framework; Kevin Hakman, co-founder of TIBCO General Interface; etc have raised a few pertinent questions:

• How significant is Enterprise Mashups to you (your customers)?


• How can I make AJAX applications that easily go offline? (i.e. can work easily and in a similar manner when not connected to the Internet.)


• Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud?


• Is AJAX about more than just web development? Should we be campaigning to replace all desktop apps with an AJAX equivalent?


• How do you apply user interface patterns and user experience design to your AJAX project?


• What are people mostly using AJAX for? Enhancing existing website, building a new website, building an application, replacing an old client/server application, etc?
  

Read complete AJAX questions


Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

2008: The Year of RSS

A latest post on newsgator speaks about what will be the trend throughout 2008 in RSS, both from the consumer and enterprise RSS perspective. It highlighted the following trends in the year ahead:

Portal Plumbing. Using RSS / Atom as a way for backend systems to funnel information (both publishing and retrieving) into a single access points that are easy to use and easy to manage. As increasing number of users are using iGoogle and Netvibes as their own aggregator, and are using RSS to accomplish this.

RSS will be the transfer protocol between yourself and your social networks.

Ease of use will be greatly enhanced with discovery and filtering mechanisms to help you find new content and sort/organize the feeds you already subscribe to.

Atom publishing will become more important as well within social networks. A widely adaptable comment publishing protocol will emerge that would allow users to comment on an item.

Within the enterprise, the use of authenticated feeds to access transaction and master data systems will rise.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation