The Internet of Services and Enterprise 2.0

In a comment to my post "The business case for Enterprise 2.0", Daniel Tunkelang pointed me to the (free) online book from SAP's International Research Forum. I have browsed through the book and it seems to provide a pretty good introduction to concepts such as Enterprise 2.0. I'd like to share parts of the introduction and some of the visualizations used in the book. The following is from the introduction:

The unifying idea which permeated each discussion was the concept of the Internet of Services. The Internet of Services is the larger concept of a web-based service economy that ties together many trends discussed in this book, such as the service grid, software as services, social networking, and so on. In contrast to the first incarnation of the web, Web 1.0 if you will, which was primarily a collection of pages, the Internet of Services has emerged as a rich collection of content, functionality, and methods of interaction. Instant messaging, texting, viralvideo, teleconferencing, voice over IP, social networking, blogs, wikis, and virtual worlds all bring people together in ways never before possible.

The digital means of production have been truly democratized, not only because it is easy to create all of these forms of content, but also because the moving parts, the services, are now available as toolkits. Consumers have arrived en masse to enjoy the Internet ofServices, and the positive experience they get from many offerings is putting pressure on business technology to follow suit. Indeed, it is possible to see the phenomenon of software as a service as the applicationof consumer-friendly techniques applied to enterprise software.

I think this section of the introduction can serve as a two-minute background to my two-minute business case for Enterprise 2.0. I also found some nice visualizations that can be good to have hidden up my sleeve if there is a need to expand on the business case, the first one illustrating the concept of "the Internet of Services" and the progression of topics at the 2007 International Research Forum:



Below are the eight core patterns of Web 2.0, as identified by John Musser in "Web 2.0: Principles and Best Practices", an O’Reilly Radar Report:



The cycle below illustrates "the functions of Enterprise 2.0 and how they work together to create value."



Finally, here is an illustration of event driven blogging: