Abstract
This chapter provides a commentary on the opportunities and challenges faced by organisations as they move towards exploiting Web 2.0 capabilities for enterprise intelligence. Intelligence in this context entails having information about the state of the world, perceiving its significance, and acting appropriately. The adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities along with developments in cloud computing and social computing technologies enables businesses to develop extended enterprise architectures (and thus has implications for business process design and development). The associated challenges for knowledge management are concerned with integration and exploitation of internal and external intelligence in real time to enhance the business value proposition and deliver context-aware services and enhanced client experiences. In addition to capturing micro data about user behaviours on websites, strategies for enterprise intelligence also need to include access to the intellectual, social and relational capital embodied in social networks. Strategies may include a combination of tactics for leveraging network effects, exploiting long tail distributions, engaging external users and clients to provide informational content, and crowd sourcing. The focus on capturing and analysing large volumes of real time data about user behaviours and social network dynamics distinguishes Web 2.0 strategies from those of earlier web-based business strategies, and this entails both access to very large volumes of data (about user behaviours, personal networks and location) and the capacity to mine this data for meaningful patterns. The field is young, and issues of trust, legal, ethical and technical standards are often without precedent, and therefore organisations will need to attend to these in a proactive manner.
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Notes
- 1.
The long tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of the population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a “normal” (symmetric about the mean) or Gaussian distribution.
- 2.
In the early 1990s Evans and Wurster’s Blown to Bits underlined the idea that compared to traditional business models for reaching customers, where there had to be a trade-off between the richness and reach of communications (e.g. one-on-one interaction with a salesperson versus a broadcast advertisement in a national paper with a wide circulation) the Internet made it possible to have both richness and reach, as it was possible to have customised communications for different audiences spread across vast geographical areas. Hal Varian’s Information Rules developed the idea of developing value propositions based on the versioning of information for different audiences. These ideas were influential in shaping e-business models, but were largely used in the context of the traditional linear value chain.
- 3.
In Google’s terms, PageRank “…reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results…PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”
- 4.
Howe (2006) coined the term “crowd-sourcing” for “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”
- 5.
The power of this effect is illustrated by Facebook’s reported trajectory of growth from 50 M active users in October 2007 to 500 M in July 2010 (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline accessed 21/02/11).
- 6.
“The 23/04/09 issue of Nature (Kwok 2009) reported that the GSM Association, a mobile communications industry trade group, announced in February that the number of mobile-phone connections worldwide had hit 4 billion and was expected to reach 6 billion by 2013.”
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Merali, Y., Bennett, Z. (2011). Web 2.0 and Network Intelligence. In: Warren, P., Davies, J., Simperl, E. (eds) Context and Semantics for Knowledge Management. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19510-5_2
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