Enterprise 2.0 (Part 2) - Use Web Standards to unlock data

In my previous post on Enterprise 2.0 , I wrote about adopting people centric/social focus of web2.0 within company intranet and build corporate facebook as central piece of intranet. One of other aspects of web2.0 is use and adoption of web standards and creation of rich UIs. Web2.0 has put emphasis on making web systems standard compliant, something which was done but not with same zeal in Web 1.0 world. Some of standards and technologies which we find in web2.0 systems are:

• XHTML (transitional and strict)
• CSS 2.0
• JavaScript (AJAX style)
• Microformats
• Clear and sensible URIs
• REST style of architecture

I remember that until few years back, many developers I knew, use to shy away from working on HTML/JS/CSS , treating them like low grade vassals. Coding backend was always considered sexier proposition. Web2.0 thankfully has brought focus back on these simple but powerful technologies. Proper delivery of content and creating rich and responsive UIs is as complex and important a task as it is to code backend to support business logic. Anybody working in an organization would tell us what kind of "shitty" applications they have to deal with everyday. And reason for this is that almost no effort was spent on “designing usability” of those applications. I have seen applications where users have to navigate 4 screens just to choose a value for a text field. Usability aside, there has generally been an ignorance about adopting web standards while building web applications behind firewall.

The reason that web standards should be adopted and enforced is for simple reason that standard compliance makes it easier to integrate applications and at same time reduce the barriers to access the data. As I wrote on one of my previous posts, properly designed URI space can be so helpful in unlocking the information and making it easier to access and reuse. Use of validated XHTML for building UIs is that semantic is built right in the web page and another application can parse it and do something useful with it when needed. Microformats are another simple but powerful format for encoding the data. Many organizations struggle with multiple sources and formats of employee profiles and resumes scattered all across variety of systems. There could be few online profiles, directory entries, PPT profiles (trust me) or employee bio-data kept in a word file and stored in file storage. This all could be simplified by adopting “hRes like Microformat” to encode employee resume making it human readable and machine parsable at same time. Any other system which might need word format or pdf format of resume, can just parse the microformat based resume (passed as an URI :)) and emit it in a word format. This is only a simple example but goes on to show how using web standards makes data and information more mobile and Integrate-able and you don’t always need heavy duty SOA to make that happen for you.

In essence, organization IT has to have guidelines and principles which should dictates that all internal web systems follow web standards and these guidelines should be know to all those who manage and build web systems within organization. Adoption of these simple standards would result in value creation resulting from unlocking of the information which otherwise get entrapped, becomes static and get stuck in silos of application landscape.