Web 2.0: benefits & considerations.

• Author: Wilkins, Jesse

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Organizations will move faster or slower to Web 2.0 depending on their regulatory environment and tolerance for risk. But they are moving toward the technology--for a number of reasons.

1. Tools are simple to provide and maintain.

   One of the challenges many organizations experience is maintaining an increasingly complex IT infrastructure. Even smaller organizations still have to provide their employees with e-mail, office productivity tools, and all the other capabilities required by the modern knowledge worker. Those applications require specialized, highly skilled people to provide, operate, and maintain them. For most organizations, something as simple as moving to the most current version of software is not so simple; ask your IT staff what the process is for upgrading to a new version of Microsoft Exchange. Web 2.0 tools are much simpler to provide and require no maintenance from the perspective of the organization.

2. They have little downtime.

   The next benefit is a bit counterintuitive and may not be applicable for the largest, most sophisticated organizations. But for the rest, uptime is a major issue. Most Web 2.0 tools simply don't have downtime. Gmail has been in the news lately because it has experienced several outages; then again, it provides more than 7 GB of storage each to some 50 million users worldwide. Even taking those outages into account, Google has provided better than 99.9% uptime over the past 12 months, averaging 10 to 15 minutes downtime per month. That compares pretty favorably to all but the most mature enterprises.

3. They are low-cost.

   The previous two points lead to a third, which is perhaps the most important benefit of Web 2.0 tools. These tools are a fraction of the cost to provide and even lower cost to maintain. Granted, they generally include fewer capabilities, but some organizations see that as an additional benefit. Consider a small organization without the budget or technical expertise to implement a massively resilient e-mail system with automated failover and multiple stage-gate deployment capabilities. The cost to implement Web 2.0-based e-mail capabilities is significantly lower, and it requires almost no technical expertise. There are no upgrades, hot fixes, or service packs to apply, and no need to migrate--in fact, Web 2.0 tools have begun to turn the entire concept of software versioning on its head.

   Almost all organizations today, regardless of their industry, sector...