Human Challenges

I came across an interesting survey about Web 2.0 conducted by McKinsey in January this year: “How businesses are using Web 2.0”. Nearly 3000 executives from all over the world replied.

Web 2.0 is seen to consist of the following elements/technologies (referring to the article):

• Blogs like this one, online journals or diaries hosted on a Web site and often distributed to other sites or readers using RSS (see below).

• Collective intelligence refers to any system that attempts to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decisions. Technologies that contribute to collective intelligence include collaborative publishing and common databases for sharing knowledge.

• Mash-ups are aggregations of content from different online sources to create a new service. An example would be a program that pulls apartment listings from one site and displays them on a Google map to show where the apartments are located.

• Peer-to-peer networking (sometimes called P2P) is a technique for efficiently sharing files (music, videos, or text) either over the Internet or within a closed set of users. Unlike the traditional method of storing a file on one machine—which can become a bottleneck if many people try to access it at once—P2P distributes files across many machines, often those of the users themselves. Some systems retrieve files by gathering and assembling pieces of them from many machines.

• Podcasts are audio or video recordings—a multimedia form of a blog or other content. They are often distributed through an aggregator, such as iTunes.

• RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other information.

• Social networking refers to systems that allow members of a specific site to learn about other members’ skills, talents, knowledge, or preferences. Commercial examples include Facebook and LinkedIn. Some companies use these systems internally to help identify experts.

• Web services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with one another automatically in order to pass information or conduct transactions. For example, a retailer and supplier might use Web services to communicate over the Internet and automatically update each other’s inventory systems.

• Wikis, such as Wikipedia, are systems for collaborative publishing. They allow many authors to contribute to an online document or discussion.

By far the biggest investment is done or has been done in web services, then follows collective intelligence and peer-to-peer networking. For the rest more companies are planning to invest than have actually invested. The difference to companies already engaged is generally rather low in this segment with the exception of blogs and mash-ups which are currently not so much favored. 54% of respondents though plan to invest in mash-ups so this looks like the trend of the near future.

I also found the regional analysis interesting. China is the most advanced region to use (or plan to use) peer-to-peer networks, collective intelligence and social networks! North America is leading with blogs and RSS, wikis and mash-ups are most used in India.

The industry that will invest most in Web 2.0 technologies in the next 3 years is the retail industry followed by high tech. Technology is mostly used to interact with customers, suppliers and partners but to the biggest extent to manage internal collaboration with the two main areas knowledge management and product design & development.

Proof that Web 2.0 has a benefit to companies fostering multiple relationships. As Web 2.0 gets increasingly important HR needs to get familiar with the benefits of those technologies for employee engagement.