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July 14, 2008

Enterprise 2.0 and UI Design

Categories: UI, Widgets, enterprise 2.0 — admin at 12:32 pm


The term Enterprise 2.0 has become a popular term used to describe the general transformation taking place within the enterprise as companies move towards embracing Web 2.0 technologies and practices.  I mentioned the trend a couple of days ago. The phenomena is actually very simple and very prevalent - what makes sense on the Internet, eventually makes sense in the enterprise - think Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Widgets, Enterprise Social Networks, Enterprise Video and even Enterprise user-generated content!

Enterprise 2.0 User Interface Design:
More recently companies have gotten around to updating internal (and external) web-based application to incorporate Web 2.0 design and technologies. Here are some of macro and micro trends we have seen or proposed as it relates to enterprise clients:

  • Updating their presentation layers to leverage XHTML/CSS
  • Incorporating AJAX and FLEX components in their UI’s
  • Moving away from “Frame-based” design to simpler CSS-inspired skinnable UIs (this CSS Zen Garden for the Enterprise)
  • Adding support for user feedback and user-generated content in the form of rating widgets, user comments and discussions, as well as content upload capabilities
  • Adding support for RSS and other forms of syndication to their applications
  • Mashup that integrate both Internet and enterprise feeds
  • Continued move towards Enterprise “start-pages” (Enterprise dashboards like Netvibe, i.e.) and Enterprise Widget
  • Increased support for Video and other rich media content
  • Mobile application support (especially for the iPhone and Blackberry)
  • Converting from SOAP and WSUI based web service architectures to more modern XML REST and JSON

July 10, 2008

Enterprise 1.0 vs Enterprise 2.0

Categories: enterprise 2.0 — admin at 3:08 am

Most of our Enterprise clients are very much involved in moving their organizations towards becoming more “2.0″.  The concept of Enterprise 2.0 has in the past represented “technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email”.  Enterprise 2.0 Conference came out with a chart that did a pretty good job of identifying some of the organizational differences between Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 1.0 Enterprise 2.O
Hierarchy
Friction
Bureaucracy
Inflexibility
IT-driven technology / Lack of user control
Top down
Centralized
Teams are in one building / one time zone
Silos and boundaries
Need to know
Information systems are structured and dictated
Taxonomies
Overly complex
Closed/ proprietary standards
Scheduled
Long time-to-market cycles
Flat Organization
Ease of Organization Flow
Agility
Flexibility
User-driven technology
Bottom up
Distributed
Teams are global
Fuzzy boundaries, open borders
Transparency
Information systems are emergent
Folksonomies
Simple
Open
On Demand
Short time-to-market cycles