SandHill.com has posted an interview with Ross Mayfield discussing the Enterprise 2.0 buzzword. The "Simple tools with simple rules" statement describes, in a nutshell, the advantage of simple web enabled applications over tradition commercial-off-the-shelf software. Mr. Mayfield then states:
When users use technologies in an unstructured way – email, blog posts, adding links in wikis, and so on – the information structure reveals itself.
"Off-the-shelf" software cannot be used outside of the context of traditional usage. The company controls the deployment and usage of the product.
The above is completely true, but there are two problems with web-enabled apps. The first is the feature set. If the feature set is too small, the value of the application is severely diminished because, from the user's point of view, it lacks completeness. No one wants to use a tool that only completes part of the job. And if it is used, a supplementary processes/applications must be used to finish the task. This is the multiple-step problem. Simple tasks should be completed from start to finish from a single source.
The second problem with simple applications is interoperability. If a process requires multiple simple applications, how do we move data between them? This implies: a physical transfer problem(moving a file/data from one site to another) and a formatting problem(is the data at the output of one process usable by the input of the next process?).
The solution is simplicity, customization, and standards. Web-enabled apps must be simple but customizable to the meet the user's process requirements exactly. Then generally-accepted standard data formats solve the interoperability problem. A good example of the customization and expandability is Yahoo's Pipes.
The Next Wave of Enterprise 2.0 - sandhill.com
Yahoo Pipes - pipes.yahoo.com
