Although sometimes a museum environment seems a long way from a traditional ‘enterprise’, this post from John Hagel raises some interesting points around the resistance to Web 2.0 applications inside enterprises and contrasts Web 2.0 with Service Oriented Applications (SOAs).
There will be some resonance in the quote below – particularly as museums move more towards explicitly social uses of their data and digital assets (at least in a way that is beyond traditional museum business in terms of exhibitions).
When you talk to SOA proponents today, you will hear a lot about connecting applications and databases, but not a lot about connecting people together and helping to support their interactions with each other. In contrast, Web 2.0 advocates put a lot more emphasis on the opportunity to connect people together and to support their collaborative efforts. Web 2.0 certainly also addresses issues of connecting applications and data, but Web 2.0 is distinctive in the social dimension that it explicitly addresses.
The next wave of innovation by enterprises will depend on the ability to connect people together more effectively, especially at the edge of enterprises, and provide them with tools to support collaborative creation. In this context, Web 2.0 technologies like wikis will play a key role in driving value creation in the enterprise. As Dion Hinchcliffe has written, the architects and software engineers that dominate enterprise IT departments disconnect in discussions of Web 2.0 technologies because of the strong social aspect addressed by these technologies. SOA proponents ignore these technologies at their peril.