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Yesterday I attended the Network World ITRoadmap Conference & Expo in Rosemont. At the expo, I sat in on the Web 2.0 in the Enterprise session, where Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research and Alex Petrov of Whirlpool Canada talked about Web 2.0. I’m going to be blunt here: Lazar’s presentation was almost worthless if you had already been following Web 2.0 in any way over the past year. All he talked about for 90 minutes was Web 2.0 itself, only dipping his toe into Web 2.0’s actual use in the enterprise. There is more content in the first sentence of each section of the Wikipedia entry for Web 2.0 than in Lazar’s entire presentation! No joke.

When Petrov was finally able to take the mic, the presentation finally touched on some actual enterprise use of Web 2.0 technologies. Unfortunately, Petrov only touched on Whirlpool Canada’s use of (or rejection of) those technologies. He claimed that Whirlpool Canada tried just about every Web 2.0 application available, but he did not give many concrete examples of things that did and did not work. Of the few examples he gave, none had any details. For example, he mentioned using Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and Quickr, but he gave no reasons for these choices. I also know that they rejected Skype and PBWiki, but not why. I would have appreciated if Petrov had said something about why a particular technology worked or did not work in the company, or why technology B was used over technology A.

OK, that’s enough about what I did not like. Here are a few things that I already knew, but I may not have written about or verbalized yet:

• You cannot just implement Web 2.0 technologies for the sake of it. You must justify the implementation and use with increases in productivity, teamwork and customer service. These benefits of the technology amy be difficult to measure.
• Web services are key in today’s infrastructure, because they can eliminate the limitations specific to different operating systems. Of course, those limitations are replaced by the limitations of the web browser.
• Web 2.0 applications improve as the number of users increases. With more users, you get more collective intelligence and more mash ups (given access to APIs). These can combine to create much more out of the technology than what was originally envisioned.
• Network requirements, access, training and regulatory compliance must all be considered before implementing Web 2.0 technologies. While leaving users to make use of the system in the best way they see fit, it is difficult to pull back the reins when things get out of hand.

OK, so it looks like attending the session at least helped me to communicate some things that I already knew. In another post I will share a few ideas I have about Web 2.0 in education. Some are simple, like the use of blogs by administrators, and some are more complex, like creating a dashboard on a web portal. I hope to have that post ready by Monday.

P.S. This post debuts my use of tags on the blog. To the right you will find a tag cloud, a visual representation of the hot topics on my blog. I hope to eventually tag all posts, but like my other endeavors requiring review of every post (there are, in fact, at least two other such endeavors), it’s going to take some time. The question is how much time.