Abstract
During the early years of the World Wide Web, also commonly referred to as the internet, there was relatively little engagement between content providers and end-users, or between end-users. Although some specialized communities, such as newsgroups, approached the internet as an open, decentralized, participative platform, not many content providers really did. Communication occurred mainly in a top-down, one-to-many, centralized mode of content broadcasting. In many ways the internet remained similar to already existing media such as television or radio. This first era of development is now being referred to as web 1.0. The advent of Web 2.0 has been about embracing the inherently open and social characteristics of the internet. It supports a profound change in communication toward a many-to-many, decentralized format. The latter favors the emergence of bottom-up trends rather than the design of top-down, paternalistically imposed strategies and structures. Web 2.0 applications aspire to make maximal use of the level playing field for engagement offered by the internet, both technologically and socially (O’Reilly, 2005, 2006). The World Wide Web has thereby entered “the realm of sociality” (Bouman et al., 2007), where software becomes fused with everyday social life. Social software applications such as Wikipedia, Facebook and MySpace have all but become household names.
TopBackground
If anything, information systems (IS) researchers have established that there can be a wide gap between investing in an IT resource and realizing business value from its use. Consequently, any such investment comes with a certain degree of risk. From Peppard & Ward (2004), we borrow a general view on organizational benefits realization from IS. Their framework allows us to distinguish between three categories of concepts which co-determine the value created by an IS: the ends (organizational objectives), the means (IT artifacts), and the ways (new working practices). We use this framework to organize this background section on Web 2.0.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Open Innovation: “Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology,” (Chesbrough et al., 2006, p. 1).
Web 2.0: The introduction of the notion of Web 2.0 is all about embracing the inherently open and social characteristics of the internet. The transition from 1.0 to 2.0 represents a profound change in communication toward a many-to-many, decentralized format. Web 2.0 favors the emergence of bottom-up trends rather than the design of top-down, paternalistically imposed strategies and structures. Web 2.0 applications, often referred to as social software, aspire to make maximal use of the level playing field for engagement offered by the internet, both technologically and socially.
Enterprise 2.0: McAfee (2006a) coined the term enterprise 2.0 to describe companies buying or building platforms with wikis and social networking software to support and enhance the continuously changing and emergent collaborative structures of knowledge work across the (extended) enterprise.
Governance: Governance is an organizational design activity that serves to simultaneously restrict and enable management. The activity of governing involves: a) defining expectations for the organization and its constituents, b) specifying allocation rules for the resources to help accomplish these expectations, and c) defining the framework to verify the organization’s performance.
Structuration Theory: A sociological theory applied to the field of IS by, amongst others, Orlikowski (2000). The theory helps to describe how social structures, that is patterns of social interaction, are developed, changed or re-affirmed through a) users interacting with an IT artifact, and b) users attributing meaning to the technology by integrating the (non-)use into their work practices.
Web 1.0: Web 1.0 refers to the early years of the internet. It marks an era where the main mode of communication between content providers and users was predominantly top-down and centralized. In fact, during this era, the web was very much approached as a continuation of traditional broadcasting media such as television or radio.
Collective Creativity: “Collective creativity reflects a qualitative shift in the nature of the creative process, as the comprehension of a problematic situation and the generation of creative solutions draw from – and reframe – the past experiences of participants in ways that lead to new and valuable insights,” (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006, p. 484).
IS Benefits Realization: A general view on creating organizational benefits from IS. It distinguishes between three categories of concepts which co-determine the value created by an IS: the ends (organizational objectives), the means (IT artifacts), and the ways (new working practices).