How to use Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

My friend Anant Jhingran caused some controversy at a VC event last week. Anant suggested that enterprises will demand levels of oversight and control before allowing Web 2.0 applications onto their networks.

Let’s use outside-in thinking to imagine what some of the varied stakeholders in an enterprise / Web 2.0 conflict might look like.

(A) There is a Compliance stakeholder. She worries about things like:

• Adhering to legislation, e.g., copyright law.
• Point in time legal requirements, e.g., when records are subpoenaed.
• Corporate business controls, e.g., internal audit requirements on information flow.

(B) There’s also a Protection stakeholder. She worries about things like leakage or theft of the enterprise’s intellectual property.

(C) In this discussion, folks tend to focus on the IT Systems stakeholder. She worries about things like:

• Load management for the backend servers and networks affected by the Web 2.0 apps.
• Quality management, e.g., what happens if a bug in a mashup application leads to bad business decisions by the users who composed that app.

(D) The Knowledge workers are also stakeholders, who want their Web 2.0 applications. They want things like:

• Flexibility, to do their jobs as they best know how.
• Speed, not having to wait for the centralized IT department to give them the tools to work.
• Fun, to have the power to make a difference in their jobs.
• “What, would you take away Excel next?”

In this debate, as Anant saw, it is easy to say, “you can’t fight the power of the masses jazzed up on mash-ups!” But you can see that there are some serious stakeholder needs that cause nervousness in Enterprises. We should respect these pressures.

So the issue really is how to balance these stakeholder needs.

Here’s one example of how an Enterprise might satisfy all these stakeholders:

1. Compliance in general: inform the users, educate, and trust them. Perhaps allow random, infrequent reviews for internal business controls.
2. Compliance in some specific cases: inform the users, educate and trust them. May have to be more restrictive in some well defined specific cases.
3. Protection: inform the users, educate and trust them. Perhaps provide tools, e.g., meta-data on levels of risk in the materials they compose. Maybe also allow for random, infrequent reviews for internal business controls.
4. IT Systems: expect IT to self-detect loading issues. For quality, inform and educate the users, perhaps provide tools to help them.

It is difficult to imagine this as a binary situation. The last thing businesses can afford to do is ignore or prevent the innovation of their own employees seeking to do the job better, faster, and in a more fun fashion.

There’s a lot of work – and risk – for enterprises in the balanced approach. What could we (the community of technology professionals) do to make it safer or easier for enterprises to get excited about Web 2.0?

(Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=184140074&size=m; by Luiza)