« Web 2.0 versus SOA: another phony war? | Main | ESB rankings show convergence with BPM and highlights the benefits of configuration driven implementation »

Sometimes reading about Web2.0, the evangelicalism obscures what could be useful for the enterprise. No better example of this than the quote from David Girourard of Google who says:

Enterprise software is entirely bereft of soul. It is designed for business not for humans.

More analytically, Barry Briggs defines the difference between SOA and Web 2.0 as such

SOA is heavyweight but robust enterprise architecture; Web 2.0 is democratic, social and participant-based. On the surface, they are orthogonal. They target different problems: so it's just as hard to imagine building a lightweight wiki with SOA as it is a global supply chain with (say) MySpace.

I won’t get into the argument about whether SOA as an enterprise architecture must be inherently heavyweight or whether it is self-imposed complexity – neither position I agree or even disagree with wholly. Instead what I found interesting was the definition of Web2.0 as democratic, social and participant-based.

This idea is expressed in a slightly different way in Don Hinchcliffe’s web2.0 blog:

Web 2.0 emphasizes a social aspect that SOA is completely missing. And probably to its lasting detriment. SOA has much more central control, management, and governance while Web 2.0 is free wheeling, decentralized, grassroots, and with absolutely no command and control structure.

Clearly, the emphasis of Web2.0 is user interaction rather than system to system interaction as I covered in my last blog item in this series, But every SOA deployment must have users and hence there must be ways to leverage Web 2.0 into a SOA environment.

More importantly from blogs to wikis to sites such as bebo and MySpace, Web 2.0 shows us that it is possible to engage individuals who are not primarily techies and actually get them to use less polished software solutions in exchange for more control. Anybody who has edited wikipedia entries will know that the user interface isn’t polished – but frankly it is "Good Enough" and “Good Enough” is the key measure when the user actually wants to use a tool because they see the benefit.

The question is how does this translate into the enterprise – the enterprise is of course full of people who use computers but are not computer programmers. While not computer programmers, these users are willing to use relatively difficult tools (and excel is the perfect example that I mentioned in the last item) if they are allowed to.

The remaining issue then becomes will they use Web 2.0 tools and even should they be let (or should that privilege be kept exclusively for professional computer programmers) . This is question raised by Tony Baer in a comment to the last item in this series

Given the loosey goosey nature of Ajax tooling and practices at this point, it will be interesting if we see in Web 2.0 a replay of the client/server era when VB gave non programmers enough ammo to be dangerous.

Why did VB proved such a “dangerous tool”? If we agree to set aside immaturity in the tool at the time Tony probably refers to which made it easy to do the first 60% and really hard to do the last 40%, I would suggest that the major problem was that the corporate IT environment lacked in governance: it relied on the fact that the ‘citizens’ living on the edge couldn’t do much unless allowed to do by corporate IT and hence ‘citizens’ were well-behaved because they didn’t have much choice in the matter. These new VB based citizens (mostly accidently) didn’t stick to the unwritten and unenforced rules and caused problems.

However, SOA recognizes that it is no longer possible to maintain such a rigid environment if we want to encourage reuse and reflect the new business models from process outsourcing to software as a service. The SOA blueprint is to create an environment with not only well defined services but also good governance which maintains and ensures "good" behavior. Because of this, within a SOA environment there should be much greater potential to devolve more control to the users: If the account wants a mash-up showing latest invoices and inventory – let him build it. If the sales team wants to track key accounts in the pipeline against press releases on yahoo – let them build it. The governance structures will stop unauthorized access and will spot unacceptable grabbing of bandwidth or breaches of security and so on.

So in theory we are set for an explosion of use of Web2.0 technologies in the enterprise. In reality, I see three blockers along the way:

1.The tools are mostly still designed by techies for techies and what a techie finds acceptable is far from what a business user will use. Therefore, we need to identify the tools that are mature – or drive the maturity - and build projects around those.

2. Can the user community motivate themselves to go and do it? This will vary from organization to organization: It also requires some more thought about how these new tools will be used by non-IT specialists and what they will do. For instance, we can see excitement growing about building Business Intelligence mash-ups. Is that really the big win? I am not sure.

3. Will corporate IT give up its habits of control and let go? History isn’t great on this – the PC revolution came from the departments and was not understood or even resisted by central IT in many cases. Corporate IT needs to recognize that this is an opportunity for a significant rebalancing away from its role as provider and towards its role as policy setter and enforcer.

Posted by rbradley in |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ebizq.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/451

Posted by: James Taylor at July 6, 2006 06:17 PM