The Workplace Blog

A few days ago I attended a talk at the London School of Economics on globalization and how the European Union needs to respond to it. The talk had a couple of high profile speakers like Anthony Giddens (who coined the term globalization back in the early 80s) and Neil Kinnock the former labor party leader. But fascinatingly, it was broadcast live on Second Life, the 3d online digital world.

And not only was it broadcast live, but participants sitting in the Second Life auditorium could ask questions too.
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Don’t miss the Enterprise 2.0 conference that’s taking place in Boston this week. It’s a new conference covering the impact of web 2.0 on the enterprise and has a strong speaker line up. Yesterday at the conference I heard Andrew McAfee walk through a scorecard of how enterprise 2.0 is doing and a presentation by an IBM executive. Andrew and Tom Davenport battled it out the night before in a debate about the importance of enterprise 2.0. You can catch that online.

I was struck by the lack of case studies and it made me wonder whether enterprise 2.0 is a lot younger than we’d like to believe. In fact, the IBM executive who was highlighting what IBM is doing in the space actually used a shopping cart example in his demo!

Avenue A | Razorfish is a sponsor of the conference and our very own Amy Vickers will be speaking at it on Thursday. Don’t miss her talk!

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I couldn’t help but wonder how the major portal players must thinking about enterprise 2.0. IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Vignette all at first seemed to have ignored web 2.0. This was largely because their own customers didn’t pay much attention to it in the early days.

Now it appears that the portal players are rushing to integrate web 2.0 functionality into their portal infrastructures but with mixed results. Some treat web 2.0 functionality as nothing very different to the collaboration features currently their portal infrastructures. Others like BEA see web 2.0 as having a transformative impact and as something that needs to be embraced holistically. Others like IBM, which recently partnered with Google, are focusing on partnerships while building more web 2.0 functionality into their portal products.

With legacy installed bases, it is hard for the portal players to move quickly. Enterprise portals with their rigid structures are in conflict with web 2.0 which depends upon emergent, bottom up categorizations. It will be interesting to see how much attention the portal players pay to web 2.0 in the next few years and whether their portals change significantly as a result.