This article by Heather Havenstein in ComputerworldUK reporting on Forrester research gives an interesting perspective on what is going through minds of CIOs as they face the wild wild web and the Web 2.0 revolution.

However, he added that he was surprised by the number of CIOs who responded that their use of the tools was driven in part by the risk of losing market share unless they keep up with competitors’ use of the technology.

“There is a lot of fear and uncertainty driving this adoption. I don’t think we have seen something like that since the last tech bubble and all those companies who said they had to get a Web site up and running and get online,” Young [Oliver Young, Forrester analyst and author of the report] said.

The article reports a an interesting view that:

CIOs were most likely to view social networking and blogs as unnecessary, and said that RSS, wikis and tagging had relatively clear user benefits.

The general feel I get is that while Web 2.0 technologies ARE making their debut in fits and starts within enterprises, it’s no real surprise that they don’t get it.   To quote Tim O’Reilly again:

“It’s really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data.”

I see the issue here as business not seeing the forest for the trees — RSS more so than all the other technologies listed is more than any other a platform on which other implementations are built.  How do you implement RSS? Does an RSS enabled website mean you’ve achieved Web 2.0?

Or is it using RSS as a glue in a deep network of services and sites communicating and talking to each other in a rich tapestry that demands your attention? Providing data that’s compelling and best in class in a format that’s portable and lets YOU take control.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Enterprise, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.