What is the Next Generation Enterprise?

These are uncertain times for enterprise IT professionals. A new breed of inexpensive, lightweight, and widely available social media technologies and next generation Web services has emerged to shake the foundations of traditional enterprise computing. Popular consumer-based Web tools like blogs, wikis, tagging, social networking, mashups, RSS, search, and Office 2.0 applications have captured the imaginations of millions of home users are now knocking loudly at the gates of enterprises.

Enterprise 2.0–as Harvard professor Andrew McAfee has dubbed the adoption of these user-centered applications by business organizations–represents the best opportunity yet to improve communications and collaboration with customers, coworkers, and partners. Today’s enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms provide a complete arsenal of applications for marketers to engage with their customers, for employees to collaborate on initiatives, for companies to have real-time access to actionable information. They allow people to create, participate and collaborate in ways that haven’t been possible before and to do so with easy desktop-like tools.

But, Enterprise 2.0 also represents a major challenge to the ability of IT professionals to perform their traditional tasks–keeping legacy systems and data humming and safe from intruders, getting new applications up and running and helping users be more productive. While most enterprise applications are predicated on rules, constraints, policies, controls and processes, Enterprise 2.0 applications are emergent, meaning the patterns and structure inherent in interactions become visible only over time, and free form, which McAfee defines as “optional, free of up-front workflow, egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities, and accepting of many types of data.” These are still radical ideas in most IT shops today.

Enterprise 2.0 is not the only revolutionary force gathering around enterprise IT at this moment in time. Many large organizations are moving steadily toward SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) in order to respond quicker to desired changes in business processes. Web-native SaaS (Software as a Service) applications are rapidly gaining traction as an alternative to in-house installations. In the Next Generation Enterprise, key applications are likely to be based on the SaaS delivery model, SOA architecture, simple web services based integration, extensibility and openness. The CIO’s role in rolling out these new technologies may be as much that of evangelist and enabler, as traditional gatekeeper and information architect.

Business unit managers and CIOs alike are exploring new ways to increase productivity and profits. Navigating this new sea change in technology is not trivial. BSG, with its rich heritage in migrating clients through disruptive technology paradigms, is well positioned to assist moving its clients to the Next Generation Enterprise.

The explosion of social media combined with the Web Services infrastructure of the Internet, collectively referred to as Web 2.0, has forged the ability to connect companies, customers, suppliers, and employees in a rich way – both socially and with easily exchangeable data formats. The most important aspect of this shift to collaborative, social media is user-adoption, namely that people are voluntarily contributing content – their opinions, feedback, ideas and more.

Because of the interactive nature of today’s Internet, companies can engage directly with their customers to build and grow relationships, as well as track and measure the success of those connections. The same can be said for the interplay between groups of employees and supplier relationships.

Today’s enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms provide a complete arsenal of applications for marketers to engage with their customers, for employees to collaborate on initiatives, for companies to have real-time access to actionable information. The wide variety of Web APIs such as Google’s search engine, widgets, and the existing best standards such as RSS and open source applications are opening up commercial opportunities that have never been available to the enterprise.