Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Question from Jerry Bowles - What do you see as the main institutional barriers within enterprises to the acceptance of Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions?

I see only one temporary barrier. This is the cultural and mindset barrier that needs to be changed with some of the employees. But this is a normal obstacle in front of every new field explored and pioneered by the software industry.

I think the right approach to overcome this barrier, is to change the flamboyant expressions and terminology that scare the non-geek business people. That is it for me. The Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 solutions must be explained with easier examples and definitions to the organizations and individuals that take the decisions for implementing them.

If we simply explain to the executives and management bodies that this is just the next level and the next generation online web applications, services and products – it will be a completely different story.

We must explain that this new generation services are more interactive, that their performance actually depends on the user input, capabilities and knowledge - that would make the difference.

Web 2.0 applications and solutions are nothing more than comprehensive data driven platforms and systems that usually have several layers of functionality and structure. The user intervention and coordination is crucial as the output parameters of the system are coherently dependent on what and how the end or institutional user interacts with this web 2.0 system/platform. See what a nice non-geek statement I made! .. and this is while I am trying to be as clear as possible so … to re-phrase this: Usually the Web 2.0 systems display, compute, manage, present statistical information or entertain solely based on the user input. We do not have just the dull information and advertising databanks for a website as we used to a couple of years ago. The Web evolved to a better stage – The interactive one, the stage where the user is somebody and the single opinion can significantly influence single or multiple societies as those societies are interconnected and living structures

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