Accessing Content: Anytime, Anywhere
How do corporate users manage their inflow (the bombardment) of information in their personal lives? Any way they can. They read content bits on their phones and PDAs, print out articles and take them on the train, and construct home pages on portal sites with channels of specific content. How can corporate IT help its users manage these information streams? Can corporate IT supply BI content and data through similar channels to support its users better?

RSS (or Really Simple Syndication), which delivers data as an XML file or an "RSS feed," can be considered part of Web 2.0 if one applies O'Reilly's "Hierarchy of 'Web 2.0-ness," one of whose key characteristics is that "the application could only exist on the net," not to mention the recent spike in popularity of RSS. Leveraged properly, RSS can be a solution to the information overload problem by allowing users to control the method and level of information they receive. Specifically, IT can create an enterprise RSS feed aggregator that caches and publishes, for example:

• Popular and industry-specific feeds
• User-created feeds to publish the information they produce (e.g., document changes, internal blogs, company news)
• User-created search feeds (i.e., feeds created from custom user searches that publish new results)

Each user can then customize the Enterprise RSS infrastructure to deliver information to the device (cell phone, e-mail, BlackBerry, printer) with the frequently they prefer (hourly, daily, weekly). Leveraging current GPS-enabled cellular devices, systems can also deliver content that is location-aware (e.g., the current inventory of the nearest retail outlet). Further expanding the RSS infrastructure, an enterprise can implement language and semantic translation on the content it supports as requested by users.

Getting Started
However, as with all good things, migrating to an environment that supports a Web 2.0 world isn't trivial. There are, however, two bright spots on this front. The first is that the press is already touting many of the items discussed below and as a result, firms may already be giving these projects higher priority in the application queue. The other is that, as with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiative, an IT organization isn't required to start from a "greenfield" environment and can instead incrementally adopt these techniques when implementing applications and pay only a small increase in cost for the project to contribute to the environment.

SOA as an Enabler
A Service Oriented Architecture, while not required, will make it significantly easier to adopt Web 2.0 principles. One of the core concepts of Web 2.0 is the idea of a "hackable environment," meaning that developers can quickly cobble together various components to create new applications. While not all SOA implementations leverage Web Services, they are especially compelling to achieve the goals of Web 2.0, given their ubiquitous support from packaged applications, development environments, and the Web-at-large. In addition, their tag- and text-based nature makes them easily "parsable" and "hackable."

To further encourage the development of unique, user-centric applications, the enterprise should consider adding non-business functionality via Web Services as well. Some examples include mapping components, stock tickers/lookup, sales data from other companies, and package tracking. Adding these functions, either from the public Internet or by acquiring software that provides them, may seem odd and non-business-related but allows IT to really start to think out-of-the-box about the kind of solutions it can offer to its users.

Agile Methods & Lightweight Languages
A more lightweight development model benefits the creation of Web 2.0 solutions immensely. Industry buzz suggests that agile methods are the only option for Web 2.0, not, interestingly, the authors of the term (Dale Dougherty, Craig Cline), but in fact any short-release cycle software development technique can work. A short release cycle, releasing at least every six weeks, encourages the perpetual beta and the continuous improvement model demanded by Web 2.0 solutions.

Agile methods can bring an enterprise significant positive change. However, one should consider where to apply them and realize they aren't an appropriate solution for every problem. Some typical examples of inappropriate use include large projects (using in excess of 50 developers) or projects where the functionality required is clearly articulated with a clear release date. However, the enterprise should seriously evaluate whether these kinds of projects are worthwhile (large projects often lose momentum before release) or exist (clear requirements and dates have a nasty habit of changing over time) and consider redesigning the projects to fit an agile method instead. Experience has also shown that an agile method may be used on large projects by approaching the project from an agile viewpoint. Unfortunately, there's no clear way to tell when agile isn't appropriate and the enterprise should, instead, start with small non-mission-critical applications and learn from experience how and when to apply agile techniques.

Another common failure of agile methods is the "cowboy" developer who doesn't like writing documentation and latches on to agile as an excuse. As a result, an organization must develop or adopt an appropriate agile methodology and then ensure careful adherence to the method to avoid failure.

Along with agile methods, "lightweight languages" are becoming significantly more popular as they turn into very robust enterprise-class environments for development. Most recent languages that are generally grouped into the "lightweight" category provide native (or "near-native") support for Web services and rich Internet applications (primarily via AJAX). As a result, the Web 2.0 development leveraging these languages is especially efficient, thereby allowing greater experimentation, which is a central component of the Web 2.0 world.

Recently, not just start-ups and individual Web sites, but mature corporations have also started to believe that languages such as Ruby, Python, and Flash/Flex are robust enough to support their users. When corporate IT evaluates its portfolio of applications across different classes of uptime and reliability, it finds ideal candidates for such environments. In other words, not every application in the enterprise needs "six 9s" (99.9999%) uptime or support for 30,000 users. In fact, user loads and "mission criticalness" vary among applications. Recognizing these facts has allowed corporations to consider these "toy" languages as what they are: robust environments, particularly for applications that value change over performance and stability.

Conclusion
The Web 2.0 world brings a number of potential advantages for all applications, but business intelligence applications may benefit especially. However, increased user engagement and increased user participation don't come without cost, like implementing SOA and thinking about development differently, but they should be well worth it. The business intelligence derived from the Web 2.0 world leading to better, faster decision-making can often have a significant, measurable ROI.

The costs of migrating to a Web 2.0 world are also, strictly speaking, not significant over the long-term. In fact, migrating to an environment that supports Web 2.0 better will decrease the cost of the overall enterprise over time. Much of the literature on SOA shows how to measure the ROI and the value of migrating to SOA. Web 2.0 is just another impetus for investing in the enterprise.

Interesting Links
• Google Finance, http://finance.google.com
• Baby Name Voyager, http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager
• del.icio.us, http://del.icio.us/
• flickr, www.flickr.com/
• Programmable Web, http://programmableweb.com
• Yahoo Mail Beta, http://mail.yahoo.com
• Google Maps, http://maps.google.com
• Outlook Web Access, available with a deployed Microsoft Exchange Server
• Flash and Flex, www.adobe.com/products/flash/flashpro/ and www.adobe.com/products/flex
• Tim O'Reilly. "What is Web 2.0."
www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
• Tim Bray. "Not 2.0?" http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/08/not_20.html