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Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0

Billy Cripe and Jean Sini, along with Vince Casarez and Philipp Weckerle, teamed up to write this guide on incorporating Web 2.0 into the enterprise.  These authors, from Oracle Corporation and the Web 2.0 community, worked together to offer strategic guidelines for implementing Web 2.0 technology in your business. 

Fishbowl Solutions Interviewed Billy Cripe and Jean Sini: 

Fishbowl: Why Web 2.0?  Why is this topic more important to you than other “booms” that have happened in technology?

Billy Cripe:  Web 2.0 is more about the way people are interacting with information.  Web 2.0 is technology that mediates interaction between people.  This is the era of interaction with technology more than interaction with one specific software.  Every technology is interacting with another, not individuals just interacting with one new tool or software.  Instead, this is a widely used and mostly accepted change in the culture of technology. Jean Sini:  Web 2.0 epitomizes the realization that you are no longer browsing alone – Web 2.0 provides the social component of technology that was missing for so many years.  This new use of technology provides continuity between applications and allows for the exchange of information that Billy was talking about.  This exchange of information allows us to draw on the wisdom of the crowd and gain new understandings through joint interaction.  It is a complete paradigm shift from the way we once understood the web and the information passed through the web.  Now, people are able to interact in ways that mimic a conversation.  Gone are the days of consuming content, we are now in the time of participating in the conversation.

Fishbowl:  What was the goal of this book and what were you both trying to express to your audience through this book?

Billy Cripe:  The main goal of this book was to explore aspects of Web 2.0 relevant to business.  The paradigm shift that Jean mentioned is visible in my space, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  Social networks that allow people to interact with one another - yet this is happening in the commercial web.  What do businesses do to harness this type of change in technology?  Our goal was to provide a business perspective on how this could be applied to an enterprise; provide social interactions in the business setting.  In terms of our target audience, this is not a developer’s resources guide – this is a resource for CIO’s and IT business leaders who need to know how to best use this technology and harness its capability. 

Jean Sini: Some of the topics we address in our book is participatory web, collaboration, and social networks, as well as the question: How is the commercial sense of the web applicable to business world?  This becomes particularly concerning when one thinks about issues like privacy or the distractions this can cause in the work place.  We cover these concerns, but we also focus on people using Web 2.0 in the enterprise for the right answer.  Wikipedia is the perfect example.  People volunteer to participate in this wiki in an effort to move information forward and continually improve the quality of information.  This is how Web 2.0 can be applied to the enterprise.

Billy Cripe:  One final note – this book is a very example of how Web 2.0 can be used in business, it is a product of the tools and strategies we are talking about.  We used the web, wikis, blogs, and other Web 2.0 resources to create this book.  Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0 is an example of using the web as a platform for project management and the creation of this artifact.