Website paradigms business leaders should keep in mind.

• Author: Hill, Simon J.
• Position: GUEST COLUMN

There are three new paradigms for website development that business leaders should be thinking about when considering their Web strategy over the next five years: rich Internet applications (RIA), Web 2.0 in the enterprise, and usability as business viability (sometimes known as value-centered design).

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Usability as business viability: Your website is not just a marketing channel but a virtual form of your real organization, pursuing the objectives of your real-life departments in a virtual world: R & D, marketing, sales, service delivery and customer support.

This perspective carries implications for how your site is managed internally (e.g., who its stakeholders really are) as well as how you think about what goals it should accomplish.

For example, you are probably familiar with the idea of your website as a marketing tool: You ask yourself how well it helps you target potential customers, communicates your understanding of their individual needs to them, and showcases the relevant benefits of your products and services. But also ask yourself about its sales function; how well does your website serve as a salesperson? How well does it try to understand your customers' perceived needs and provide tools to help facilitate their choosing the best solution available?

For service delivery, how well do your online services (tools, utilities, applications) really satisfy your customers' inadequately met needs? For customer support, how well do you follow up with customers to find out how well you met their needs, troubleshot problems, improved bad customer experiences, and provided useful feedback to the other departments to improve their game?

Web 2.0 in the enterprise means different things to different people. But in essence, it means using (and sometimes creating) lightweight, browser-based applications from the Web social-networking world to improve team collaboration and communications with customers and partners. In the Web 2.0 enterprise, project status and work history is available to everyone on internal wikis and blogs, or through simple project-management tools such as BaseCamp. Team members know what the others are working on, are interested in or thinking about, even when they're thousands of miles away, and can easily contribute ideas or vote on decisions.

Important meetings or talks or workshops are available to everyone via podcasts. Getting up to speed on a project is just an hour's reading. New...