Translating Web 2.0 into the enterprise technology architecture
This is an interesting article talking about the impact that web 2.0 is having on our enterprise technology architectures. Web 2.0 means a lot of different things, but one of the key things it means is really helping the technology to work harder for the end user. The older models that expect contributors to learn difficult complex content management and intranet tools are gone. The key is for us to enable the ability for the end user’s to contribute, tag, create content and collaborate. Gone are the days of a rigid taxonomy where we expect everyone to think about things in the form of one agreed upon taxonomy.
As technology architects, this means we need to figure out a way to get out of the user’s way and let them structure the content, instead of telling the user that their content has to fit within how we built the relational database model. Look at the internals of a tool like Mediawiki. It’s one big database table. Of course that strikes fear in the hearts of every DBA, but that’s the flexibility our end users need. This quote from the article sums up the premise that a lot of web 2.0 technologies are based on, “the outcome doesn’t have to be chaos. It can be more like an ant colony.” .
