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Many of us have come to think of the business entity as the key business unit – be it a company, a group of companies, a sole trader, a partnership.  And businesses do business with other businesses – ordering, buying, selling, etc.  And each business operates to a set of standards – standards to meet their own expectations and those of their customers.  Many of the standards are driven, underpinned or enforced by external agencies e.g. State, Professional bodies, Insurerers, regulators.

The web has had all sorts of impacts on business – the emergence of online B2B abd B2C, major reengineering of processes and business themselves, globalisation on a par not expected.

And now the web is throwing new opportunities and challenges at all of us.  In fact one can only wonder if we had had this web 10 years ago what types of businesses would have been built over the last 10 years?  Which businesses would never have existed?

Even back in 1984 in TCD we were collaborating – as we worked in a group of three students to design our basic computer.  We also collaborated on the cricket field as we set traps for opposition batsmen.  And we collaborated in preparing for exams – through sharing of lecture notes, etc.

But what we are witnessing now is a series of developments – Social networking, Semantic web, the cloud – which when combined mean that those who do not collaborate risk being eliminated.  We have often discussed the importance of knowledge management within the organisation – even between partner organisations.  However the tools beginning to emerge now promise to facilitate collaboration and knowledge management on a scale previously unimagined – right across the globe, the web and time.  ultimately traditional business practices and structures must be transformed to enable society to benefit from what’s beginning to happen.

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Seems to me that variants of the cloud have real appeal for smaller businesses, businesses not sure how much processing power they require for their web facing presences and business experimenting with new customer facing applications.  Alos, wothout doubt, the ability to run ‘private clouds’ will have its application.

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Dion Hinchcliffe's well thought out piece provides a more comprehensive list of some of the pros & cons.  Time to move forward.

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Dion reflects on the impact of 4 year's of web 2.0.  He focuses on the move from 'push' to 'pull' systems.  But much of the question is our readiness/ willingness to embrace and exploit the opportunity.

• Who creates the value? (The network)

• How much control do we have over our businesses?

• How intellectual property works (creative commons…)?

• Increases in transparency e..g in supply chain

• Product development – we get that our customers tell us …but how do we listen to '000's of customers?

• Operations – cloud computing

• Customer service

Interesting to think about the value proposition that is the data companies now.  Would point business towards the unclaimed classes of data.

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The internet becoming ‘the computer’, the ‘global platform’, the trend toward the PC being just another device accessing the internet – is a valid observation.  His phrase ‘harnessing collective intelligence’ has a powerful ring to it.

O’Reilly’s talk focuses on three ideas:

1. Web 2.0 in the enterprise (enterprises opening themselves to the world in new ways)
2. Web 2.0 evolving into cloud computing – the web becomes a reality for business
3. The web, as an artifact of the PC, is going away

O’Reilly’s examples of the use of customer data by companies such as Google and Wesabe to provide relevant applications and services to their customers puts the gaunlet down to other businesses e.g. banks.

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