Web 2.0 - Don't Try this at Work

One of the big drivers of Internet applications in the corporate world was the stark contrast of what people could do at home and at work:

At Home - Buy books, buy movie tickets, look up the weather, etc.

At Work - Call HR to change health plan, call factory floor to find out what happened to customer's order, call invoicing to find out what happened to a bill, etc.

Well clearly something at work was wrong, and soon enough everything was online. :)

Now look at the difference between home and work today:

At Home: Web applications are using JavaScript and DHTML to enhance the user experience and decrease server interactions. Some random guy can combine Google Maps and Craigslist apartment listings in a useful way without talking to either Google or Craigslist (http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/).

At Work: Everything has a Netscape 3 level of UI interactivity and nothing works with anything else.

This difference in functionality and the increasing expectations of users will lead to significant change in the enterprise. As more and more Web 2.0 applications deploy, pretty soon even the CEO will be saying "some random guy can get Google to work with Craigslist, and we can't get CRM to work with ERP?" Web 2.0 = SOA, and an enterprise's customers, employees and partners are going to expect it to happen ASAP.