Technology seems to be impacting society and human life more quickly now than ever before. Social networking sites, for example, seem to be making big news every day. The latest case is Google's announcement to acquire the video sharing site YouTube for an amount of $1.65 billion. YouTube is not a large company, with only 65 employees and several years of life. And it has not begun to make profit. It remains to be seen how this acquisition is going to impact the industry.
It has never been easier for ordinary people to post and share music, pictures, and videoes through the Internet. For knowledge works, wiki and blogging sites promote crowd authoring and collaboration. The participation has never been so easy and attempting for many people who would never thought it would be possible for them to own that much control over a webpage. It's this kind of convenience and power that makes these tools so relevant and valuable for knowledge workers.
How do knowledge management and Web 2.0 technologies join force to impact business strategy? Take mass customization as the example, a company can use blogs to communicate expert insights regarding its products and services to the customers. Customers can be encouraged to dialog with the company regarding their thoughts and feelings. Wiki technology can be used to involve customers in designing new products. The online communnity, if properly nurtured, can represent a cost affordable, technically flexible and scalable, and user friendly tool for gaining susttainable competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate.
Or, what about document processing Websites that let you create, edit, and even share documents without a proprietary word processing software? For small businesses, these tools and social networking tools are not just very useful but also very affordable.
Web 2.0 technologies are everybody's KM tools.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Monday, October 09, 2006
Emergence of Second Wave e-commerce and Web 2.0 services
During the first years of e-commerce phenomenon, the widespread connectivity and the friendly user interface of Internet technologies promised to revolutionize most major business practices and thereby transform the traditional business competition landscape. Like the case with other major technological developments in the recent decades, the expectation pendulum quickly swung from the extremely optimistic to disappointing pessimistic, following the bursting of the dot-com bubbles at the turn of the new century. In the meantime, many new start-ups continue to offer experimental but highly innovative Web-based services. Established enterprises also diligently integrate e-commerce capabilities into their overall business strategies to streamline their business processes and enhance their customer contact. The Internet has continued to be the center piece in companies’ technological as well as business infrastructure. While the investment in Internet-related businesses between 1997 and 2000 was more than $100 billion, much more (more than $200 billion) was spent to purchase e-commerce businesses that were in trouble to start new online ventures between 2000 and 2003 (Schneider, 2007), a sure sign of the second wave of e-commerce steadily emerging. The demise of e-commerce that was once so widely reported was really more of a slowdown than a true collapse, in other words. The annual sales volumes of major e-commerce sectors, such as B2C and B2B, have continued to increase.
Among the differences between the first and the second waves of e-commerce, the most striking are the convergence of the participant roles and the connection technologies. On the technological side, broadband access and wireless transmission greatly enhance the convenience of communication and facilitate exchange of multimedia contents. Furthermore, the anywhere and anytime computing offered by wireless transmission technologies, stimulates rich and real time communications between the various e-commerce participants. From the service provider’s perspective, these Web 2.0 services represent a new wave of innovative business model that threatens the future of well-established technology giants.
The Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as a collection of Websites that “refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services - such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies - that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.” Web 2.0 services are characterized by user-centered services to provide a technological platform for user participation in content development. The rapidly growing web logs and wiki sites demonstrate the effect of the network effect that once was considered one of the most powerful features of the Internet as a business strategy implementation technology. The network effect predicts the benefit for the network participants resulting from linking a group of entities grows at an exponential rate. In the Web 2.0 scenario, both buyers and sellers are actively involved in collaborated activities of value creation. Those companies that successfully harness this shared power and responsibilities are making Internet a truly interactive mass media and are capturing an increasing share of customer attention. The most publicized examples include http://www.google.com/, http://www.myspace.com/, http://www.youtube.com/, and some well-participated wiki sites. It must be noted that these services are used by businesses as well as individuals for a wide variety of purposes, including knowledge management.
Reference:
Schneider, G.. (2007). Electronic Commerce (7th Ed.). Boston, Massachussetts: Course Technology.
Among the differences between the first and the second waves of e-commerce, the most striking are the convergence of the participant roles and the connection technologies. On the technological side, broadband access and wireless transmission greatly enhance the convenience of communication and facilitate exchange of multimedia contents. Furthermore, the anywhere and anytime computing offered by wireless transmission technologies, stimulates rich and real time communications between the various e-commerce participants. From the service provider’s perspective, these Web 2.0 services represent a new wave of innovative business model that threatens the future of well-established technology giants.
The Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as a collection of Websites that “refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services - such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies - that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.” Web 2.0 services are characterized by user-centered services to provide a technological platform for user participation in content development. The rapidly growing web logs and wiki sites demonstrate the effect of the network effect that once was considered one of the most powerful features of the Internet as a business strategy implementation technology. The network effect predicts the benefit for the network participants resulting from linking a group of entities grows at an exponential rate. In the Web 2.0 scenario, both buyers and sellers are actively involved in collaborated activities of value creation. Those companies that successfully harness this shared power and responsibilities are making Internet a truly interactive mass media and are capturing an increasing share of customer attention. The most publicized examples include http://www.google.com/, http://www.myspace.com/, http://www.youtube.com/, and some well-participated wiki sites. It must be noted that these services are used by businesses as well as individuals for a wide variety of purposes, including knowledge management.
Reference:
Schneider, G.. (2007). Electronic Commerce (7th Ed.). Boston, Massachussetts: Course Technology.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
What's coming up next?
The first exam shows me how we are communicating on knowledge management. It also allows me to fine tune for the rest of the semester.
We will continue to read articles on knowledge creation, distribution and application. On the technology side, we'll discuss Web 2.0 services, data mining technologies, concept mapping, mind mapping, software agent, content management, expert systems, neural network, etc. We'll also experiment with wiki, a convenient Internet tool that has been used by many companies to support collaboration projects.
Some other topics worth discussing include: community of practice, organizational culture, knowledge accounting, knowledge management program implementation methodology, and knowledge management for important business activities such as customer relationship management and e-commerce.
We will continue to read articles on knowledge creation, distribution and application. On the technology side, we'll discuss Web 2.0 services, data mining technologies, concept mapping, mind mapping, software agent, content management, expert systems, neural network, etc. We'll also experiment with wiki, a convenient Internet tool that has been used by many companies to support collaboration projects.
Some other topics worth discussing include: community of practice, organizational culture, knowledge accounting, knowledge management program implementation methodology, and knowledge management for important business activities such as customer relationship management and e-commerce.
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