Author: John Cartan, Design Architect - Oracle Applications User Experience
Editor's note: The author attended Oracle OpenWorld at San Franciscos Moscone Center the week of November 11, 2007. This is the third in a series of four reports from the show floor.
One of the major themes emerging in OpenWorld this year was Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 for the enterprise. It was being presented as a core concept for both Fusion and Apps Unlimited, and it was all about user experience.
Many of the sessions I attended this year began by trying to define the murky term "Web 2.0". One take was that Web 1.0 was about connecting information (using HTML), Web 1.5 was about connecting applications (using XML), and Web 2.0 is about connecting users (using AJAX). Web 2.0 applications use a rich, desktop-like user experience to provide a framework for highly social (user-driven, collaborative) interactions. An acronym which sums up Oracle's approach to Web 2.0 is SLATES, which stands for Searching, Linking, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions, and Signaling.
It's not immediately clear to everyone that Web 2.0 makes sense for the enterprise. Another session I attended called "Bring Web 2.0 to the Enterprise" tackled this head-on. They identified, and attempted to dispel, three myths about Web 2.0.
Myth 1 is that Web 2.0 is just about Google and blogs. But it goes deeper than that. Web 2.0 is about users creating content Wikipedia, categorizing content (tags), combining content (mashups) and building communities Facebook, LinkedIn. Communities plus content equals "collective intelligence", surely something worthwhile for the enterprise.
Myth 2 is that it's just for teens. The speaker pointed to a survey of 2800 mostly IT executives which found that 75% already planned to invest in Web 2.0 and 67% regretted they hadn't started sooner. Executives spoke of the need to harness the collective knowledge of employees, partners, and customers. Myth 3 is that it's just for startups and bleeding edge companies. Another survey showed that 90% of major companies are ready to embrace Web 2.0, provided it is supplied from a trusted source with experience in handling scaling and security issues (like Oracle).
A filmed interview with Harvard Business School pprofessor Andrew McAfee got to the heart of the issue. He argued that Web 2.0 was a fundamental paradigm shift away from imposed structure and rules to organic, bottom-up platforms that naturally accumulate content and form effective networks. This is a scary concept for some, but it's an approach that the incoming workforce is already steeped in, and one that has already chalked up some impressive results (described in books like Wikinomics).
All of this seems to me like a natural evolution of user-centered design, the approach we in the user experience community have been pushing for decades. The basic tenets of that approach are that computers should be easy to use and that people should always feel in control.
Every speaker I heard emphasized that Web 2.0 applications have to be easy to use. No one has to take classes in order to use services like Flickr or Wikipedia. Software that requires extensive training is something we can no longer afford.
And all this talk about mashups, and users generating and sharing their own content, is really about giving users more control over the way they perform their tasks. Computers will not fully achieve their potential until we are fully in control of them. Enterprise 2.0 is the inevitable next step in that evolution.
Q. (Editor): John, it sounds like enterprises are preparing to utilize Web 2.0 in a big way. How will features such as social networking or tags affect worker productivity?
A. Every office I've ever seen has at least one power user, someone who has figured out all the work-arounds and knows where to find hidden information. This person will occasionally poke her head over the cubicle wall to help new co-workers, but most of her hard-won knowledge is effectively bottled up. Imagine the productivity gains if people like this can easily share their knowledge across not just the local office but the entire enterprise. The power of a technique like tagging is that it captures the insights of experienced workers and makes that knowledge available to others. And if that knowledge can be delivered in context, at the moment users are trying to perform a new task, it means fewer interrupted task flows and less time wasted reinventing wheels.
Q. Are Oracle databases prepared to handle the content that will be generated by all the "organic growth" of the Internet we can expect from Web 2.0?
A. Web 2.0 does not necessarily increase the amount of content stored in any one place but instead increases the access to content that is already distributed across many sources. Our challenge as user experience designers is ensuring that pages load quickly and that additional content like a portlet or an embedded analytic snaps into place at the moment it's needed. Our developers and performance experts do a remarkable job of coping with these demands we are doing things today that just weren't possible a few years ago. And with increased use of AJAX partial page refreshes and other Web 2.0 techniques I am confident that we'll continue to evolve an ever-richer user experience.
