The new business order

How Web 2.0 has changed the face of business

From circumnavigating the world in eighty days, to being able to communicate across the globe in milliseconds, mankind has witnessed some extraordinary innovations. Today, information and communication technologies may have paved the way for paperless offices, replaced typewriters with computers, and to an extent, replaced traditional fact-to-face interaction. However, nowhere is their impact more profound than in the realm of business. IT has merged national and international commerce, with business targeting customers worldwide instead of being limited to a local consumer base. Data and financial transactions are now completed with the click of a button, whereas e-mails, tweets, and cellular text messages have enabled customers to communicate quickly and efficiently with businesses.

The changing landscape
Cliched as it may sound, IT has changed the face and the pace of business - almost beyond recognition - in the last few decades. With information travelling faster than ever before, the world seems smaller with every passing day - with not-so-small implications on he way we do business and live our lives. The combined effects of emerging internet technologies, increased computing power, and fast, pervasive digital communications has blurred the line between professional and private lives.

Wireless internet and smartphones have made it easy to work from home - or for that matter, from a holiday resort. The fact that it's easy to work from home attracts people to do so. On the flop side, people are also tempted to use internet access at work for personal reasons. In this way, technology allows workaholics to work and slackers to slack. So, exactly how has technology changed the way we do business?

Back in the late 1990s, people were still trying to figure out how to best use the internet for commerce. Setting up websites highlighting the company information and services were as far as many brick and mortar enterprises were willing to go, especially after the dot-com bubble burst. Today, as consumers and knowledge workers become more internet savvy, and move away from legacy software in favour of the Cloud, the changing technology landscape stands to be a potential goldmine for entrepreneurs and enterprises.

Social enablers

The forever expanding and transforming social Web has created new ways for individuals to consume goods and services, and for entrepreneurs and enterprises to come up with viable business models. All of this paints an opportunity, and perhaps a challenge, to successfully combine operations and new business initiatives.

Fundamentally, there are different ways to contemplate about businesses on the social Web. While the social aspect of business has always been present in real-life interaction. It's now become more online - just as economies are moving away from both manufacturing and transactions towards creating, managing, and leveraging intellectual capital.

For an entrepreneur, social networks embody audiences who share common interests. They mean direct access to the services they [entrepreneurs] are selling. Concurrently, major enterprise software companies are endeavouring to add social features to their existing products, to incorporate them broadly in their own standalone social software products. Notable features that have been added to Microsoft's SharePoint 2010, Salesforce's deep integration of Chatter into its SaaS platform, or SAP's new 12Sprints offering.

Web 2.0 lends small-business entrepreneurs a global reach, which means that they can do business internationally much easily than ever before. It enables the smaller player to be on equal footing with the larger, more established companies, making the world flatter place. New go after niche markets that larger companies do not pursue. Also, a company today can integrate more tightly with suppliers from around the world. Given the enhanced communication skills associated with Web 2.0, enterprises have the tools to project a global image on the market side, and to identify and work with a host of suppliers from around the world.

Moreover, with Web 2.0, the open architecture, the refinement of Web services and the ability to put together applications though mashups make the basic development costs much lower and time-to-market much quicker. Hence, more effort can be dedicated to making the actual product/service, rather than on other overheads. While good business execution remains the key for any successful venture, it seems that the possibilities for internet visionaries are much greater, and opportunities are less likely to be farfetched.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. As the social Web continues to evolve, so will businesses, and their economic models, the return on investment (ROI), and the opportunities. It appears for now that the technology that we have created is also hard at work recreating us. We have become like our work - ever changing and evolving. Where will it end? It won't. Change has become the only constant.