Over the past six months, we have learnt some valuable lessons in developing an enterprise web 2.0 business. Today there are three big challenges in this space;
- Lack of successful case studies from marquee corporates that can justify introduction of these technologies with a measurable return on investment (ROI). My experience of various conferences and speaking to a range of large enterprises have shown people tend to use the same case studies that have been in circulation over the past 6 to 8 months.
- Other issue is the positioning of these technologies. To date majority of these technologies have been either positioned as a new model of collaboration or a new channel for employees to communicate breaking down company barriers. Unfortunately CIO's don't seem to resonate with either of these as this doesn't seem a "must have" technology for them. On the contrary we are seeing it's the business more than IT which is picking up these technologies. But the downside of this model is chances of enterprise wide deployment are pretty remote.
- Lack of context, majority of these technologies provide a business need which is "soft" and hard to measure. This raises further questions during any budget allocation exercise within either IT or Business function.
One of the implications of these issues are, companies (large and medium) are reticent to buy these technologies from start up vendors. They would prefer to engage existing enterprise vendors to provide these technologies as add ons to existing platform.
The above market issues pushed us towards a complete rethink of the platform usage. After a detailed review (both internal and market), we realized the usage of these technologies / platforms can only be successful if it can be aligned to solve specific "business problems" within industries. We believe this is where these technologies have an advantage as majority of enterprises today are globalised and open, which traditional IT architectures can't support.
I would be keen to get some alternative views or experiences?
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