The Age of Customization: Enterprise Web 2.0 is the perfect pair of pants!

I spent last weekend searching for pants. I had a need. I looked for pants that were comfortable in the winter and summer but would always ‘breath’, the right material so they would last, and also pants that would be acceptable for multiple occasions. The problem is I couldn’t find a pair that met all these needs. I had to buy multiple pairs. I settled on the only solution that was available at that time. I will have to adapt the right solution (many pants) instead of having one solution (one pair of pants) that adjusts to my needs, when I need something different as situations arise.

I want a pair of pants that could change on-the-fly (no pun intended) easily; adapting to the environment and occasion as I see fit.

Well, we might not be able to do this with pants but now we can with Enterprise Applications. In fact, this type of flexibility, customization and efficiency of a solution that adapts to multiple needs will be the standard in five years time. Three forces are aligning to make this happen.

• Web 2.0 – user empowerment and customization
• Ajax – technology techniques to bring richness and back-end interactions to the user
• Services – Exposed through SOA or other, services are the enterprise applications building block of tomorrow.

These forces are aligned to support the next generation of Enterprise Applications that will be common place in 5 years. These applications will be browser-based. They will unlock the value of information previously contained in separate silos through granular services. With AJAX client side technology, they will consume these assets and allow users to interact in a rich and dynamic fashion. And with the 2.0 social networking and collaboration aspect, the tilting of the IT pendulum back towards the client side leads to more empowered end users capable of generating content and even their own ad-hoc, mashup applications.

Now you can customize your organizations applications to your needs instead of forcing your employees to adjust to a heavyweight, monolithic solution that might not be a right fit for their need. Even further, you can empower your employees to further tailor the solution to meet a particular situational need when they need to.

Why will these applications be the standard?

This new paradigm is difficult for some to grasp. We have been offered large solutions that we had to make fit into our organization and make work for what we had to get done in our jobs. But the productivity that these applications brought to transactional activities is drying up. The future is focused on the knowledge worker who has tacit activities to accomplish and where no solution has arguably truly demonstrated much benefit with regards to optimizing these people’s situational activities.

This is where organizations can increase productivity. The problem is that because of economy of scale past applications couldn’t be developed to meet these situational, micro activities needs. The technologies weren’t all there, understood enough, or further, understood in the context of their synergistic relationships which yield the capabilities to meet these knowledge workers activities needs.

The Enterprise Web 2.0 Application can. It can because the forces listed above are now converging. Enterprise Web 2.0 is a natural evolution of consumer facing Web 2.0 Applications. Web 2.0 has introduced public consumer users to its benefits and now enterprises have begun to catch on to the technologies and techniques to further their web-based applications; to leverage existing assets, whether it be data locked behind a firewall or intellectual knowledge locked in your employees heads.

I can’t wait to see what unfolds this year! (pun intended)