Speed kills - Agility for IT professionals

In this day and age Web 2.0 is far from being the new kid in town. We all heard about it, we all probably have used one or another of its offsprings - be it YouTube, Flickr, MySpace or any of the other prime examples. Every day new sites emerge and while the industry still tries to figure out how to monetize (aren’t we just great with naming ideas? ) in the new environment the question remains why IT consultants and IT service providers (particularly around software) should care about it.

Well, Web 2.0 is far more than fancy AJAX pages. In essence the new paradigm encourages collaboration between sites - bluring the boundaries between them and creating a more integrated user experience. One prerequisite of course is a trust model between sites - and this is the first major reason why IT consultants should care! Identity, identity management, identity delegation and trust models are becoming more and more important. The “traditional” federation scenarios (which to be fair only really emerged in the last few years and are far from being mature) seem to quickly reach the end of their scalability. Enterprises and governments striving for Single-Sign-On across trading partners and government agencies can greatly benefit from the experience and learnings gained in the Web 2.0 space. These people come to us for advice - so isn’t it actually our duty to look into it?

One other common characteristic of Web 2.0 is Product Development 2.0. Most successful sites have handed over key product decisions to their users. They have built extensible platforms and encourage the community to add services. They have taken the best of Open Source to their product development. They release often and early, accept that there are imperfections but rather give their users the opportunity to decide how to define imperfect (i.e. define what is an issue to them and what not). By doing so they were able to significantly reduce start-up costs. Many of these sites wouldn’t exist if they would have followed a more traditional funding process.

And that’s the point! Instead of demanding rigorous requirements and business cases we can help our clients get off the ground at a reasonably low cost - if we get a better understanding of the underlying principles and philosophy. The new products focus on solving one thing (and one thing only initially). The new products allow or even encourage external partners to build on top of their product - thereby making their product better and their target market broader. The new products have short release cycles and accept imperfection and build on user/consumer feedback. And they are successful! Why would this be a bad thing then for corporate or government clients? Exactly!

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