Collective Business Intelligence and Enterprise 2.0

Web 2.0 as defined by Tim O Reilly is "the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them" . In his blog piece he describes very eloquently how Google's Page Rank mechanism is good case of harnessing user generated content.

Now take this to the Enterprise context. Up till now most of the discussion of Enterprise 2.0 I have seen revolves around two things
1. Harnessing Collective Intelligence of workforce to collaborate and share via tools like Wiki's , blogs . Product sets include Lotus Connections , Suite Two
2. Conversion of traditional office tools to Office 2.0 style platforms. Google Docs , HP Adaptive Enterprise Solution are excellent examples that basically focus on the ability to conduct normal business in a collaborative environment without being co-located.

A third part perspective of Enterprise 2.0 that should probably be included in the mix is the Business Intelligence gathered as a result of the network effect taking place with the continuous accumulation of Employee and Customer generated data and having an even broader data set as a result of SaaS applications serving more than one Customer.

So consider Salesforce.com - with several organizations using salesforce.com , they pretty much know the business benchmarks of processes in an industry (example :If they have 15 customers in the consulting space who use salesforce from sale to staffing cycle , salesforce will have the data to understand what it takes to improve the cycle by comparing various customers).

Frankly , If I was an SaaS player , I would pay to get users to use my software so that I can get their data and further master the business processes based on Data Analysis. As Tim pointed out , that in Web2.0 world Data is King and for Enterprises in 2.0 world , knowing what data is your core asset (and hence not shareable) and what data is something that you can share is going to be key.

So now you know - why did SAP buy Business Objects ? To enable Collective Business Intelligence on their Business By Design platform stupid.