The early adopter crowd for a consumer Web 2.0 application differs vastly in numbers and attributes compared to the early adopter crowd for an Enterprise Web 2.0 application. For a consumer web application, early adopters band together across various backgrounds, industries, and geographic locations to give momentum to a newly formed consumer web application.
When dealing with an Enterprise Web 2.0, you are often dealing with one customer (company) at a time. Thus it becomes even more important to provide some kind of a 'hand shake' to the past in reducing the friction for enterprise users to convert to new application to begin to generate a similar momentum albeit within that single enterprise.
Brian Stephens of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), whom we had the opportunity to recently meet, describes this in greater detail, from his vantage point inside the enterprise:
I think the key for getting us to Web 2.0 is by adding Web 2.0 features to existing Web 1.0 applications. I attended a demo of ConnectBeam the other day. They offer a social bookmarking tool for the enterprise. During the demo, it was clear this was a very powerful and useful tool, but how do you convince an existing user base to try totally new ways of doing things? One feature they had that was pretty cool was to overlay their technology to existing intranet search results. I think this additive approach has a greater chance of success than purely alternative models...
If we're serious about getting Web 2.0 into the enterprise, we need to build a passable bridge from Web 1.0.
Jeremiah picks up the thread an outlines a practical approach.
At Connectbeam, partly due to our application target area and how we designed and architected our application, it lends itself very well to 'plugging' in to existing Intranets or other existing Web based applications - resulting in providing a seamless transition into Web 2.0.
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