DRIVERS AND BARRIERS TO THE ADOPTION OF WEB 2.0

Ashutosh Tiwari

, Rafael Navarro Fontestad

and Chris J. Turner

Decision Engineering Centre, School of Applied Sciences, Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, U.K.

Airbus CIMPA, New Filton House, Golf Course Lane, Filton, Bristol, U.K.

Keywords: Web 2.0, Business transformation, Knowledge management.

Abstract: Today, information overload and the lack of systems that provide employees with the right knowledge and

skills are common challenges that large organisations face. This can lead to knowledge workers re-inventing

the wheel due to problems in the retrieval of information from both internal and external sources. Web 2.0

tools aim to address this type of issue facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing in a corporate

setting. This paper describes the benefits and constraints associated with the use of Web 2.0 tools and

identifies the drivers behind the adoption of such tools in industry. A number of landscape overview models

are presented here that attempt to describe the effect of using Web 2.0 tools on a knowledge based

organisation. An organisation, active in the construction industry, is the focus of a case study where Web

2.0 tools are matched to real knowledge sharing and collaboration problems.

1 INTRODUCTION

Implementing knowledge management practices

within a large organisation has always been a

challenge (Robinson et al., 2005). There are a

number of key reasons for this such as the division

of work into specialist functions, geographically

distributed teams and movement of team members

between functions and organisations. This poses a

problem for an organisation wishing to capture and

share the knowledge of its workforce; and often

leads to the need to ‘re-invent the wheel’ when staff

with the requisite knowledge are no longer available

to the organisation.

The emergence of a new set of web delivered

communication and collaboration technologies,

branded by some as Web 2.0 technologies (O’Reilly,

2005), has allowed for a reassessment of the

viability of IT enabled knowledge management

practice within industry. However, despite the clear

advantages that ‘Enterprise 2.0’ can bring, some

authors (Hoover, 2007; Wiens, 2007) have

expressed concerns about adoption hurdles that Web

2.0 technologies have to overcome. Some of those

concerns are security, lack of expertise of the

knowledge workers to be familiar with the new

tools, integration with legacy technologies,

difficulties in providing a measure on Return On

Investment (ROI) and reluctance to share

information (Daniel, 2007). This paper presents the

work carried out on a project to examine the role

Web 2.0 technologies could play in the knowledge

management strategies of industry. A case study is

presented concerning the re-evaluation of an intranet

portal of a large industrial organisation (involved in

the construction industry). The drivers and barriers

inherent in the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in

industry are identified in this paper along with the

key technologies encompassed under the Web 2.0

banner.

2 METHODOLOGICAL

APPROACH

In essence a combination of interviews and

secondary research was used to deduce the

landscape overview models that result from this

work. The following phases were undertaken in the

completion of this project:-

 Phase I: Characterising Web 2.0 – identifying

the main technology segments and products

that comprise Web 2.0

 Phase II: Strengths and weaknesses of Web 2.0

for knowledge sharing – a detailed

examination of each of the software products

identified from phase I and a study of the

current knowledge architecture of the case

study organisation, including detailed

375

Tiwari A., Navarro Fontestad R. and J. Turner C.

DRIVERS AND BARRIERS TO THE ADOPTION OF WEB 2.0.

DOI: 10.5220/0002711803750378

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technology (WEBIST 2010), page

ISBN: 978-989-674-025-2

discussions with staff members of the

organisation

 Phase III: Consolidation and

recommendations – the collation of the views

on Web 2.0 technologies and

recommendations on the future technologies

that are most likely to be important for the

learning organisation

Phase I involved the completion of an extensive

literature review in the area of Web 2.0

technologies. The review focussed on the use of

Web 2.0 in a corporate setting and also involved the

identification of technology areas Web 2.0 products

interact with. In total 17 experts (in the field of Web

2.0) were consulted (via. their professional blogs) in

the completion of this research.

Figure 1: Landscape overview of Web 2.0 technologies

representing their impact on organisational knowledge

against the social element involved.

A landscape overview was constructed

identifying technology segments and products

(presented as a pictorial view of segments and

products and shown in Figure 1). This was

completed with the help of a number of senior

managers in a set of brainstorming sessions held at

the case study organisation. This information was

combined with the findings from secondary

published sources and expert opinions (via their

professional blogs). The location of the segments in

the landscape overview graphs shown in Figure 1

was based on the findings from this phase. A

research gap was drawn from this initial stage. In the

completion of phase II it was necessary to carry out

a new set of interviews and workshop sessions in

order to establish the current use of the case study

organisation’s intranet portal as a means for

knowledge sharing and re-use. An is-is of the current

intranet portal was constructed and from this

features of the portal were challenged against

potential benefits of Web 2.0 technologies (this

activity was carried out in a number of workshop

sessions completed at the case study organisation,

involving both managers and users of the portal).

Each identified Web 2.0 technology was tested and

evaluated for its relevance to the case study

organisation as part of this research. Phase III

brought together the findings of phase I and II and

delivered a set of recommendations for the

improvement of the intranet portal and an overview

of the technologies most likely to impact facilitation

of organisation knowledge sharing and re-use in the

future. Gap analysis was used to produce a set of

factsheets outlining the benefits of Web 2.0

technologies over the case study organisations

existing intranet based tools.

3 CHARACTERSING WEB 2.0

As mentioned in the methodology section of this

paper a landscape overview was constructed

identifying technology segments and products that

comprise Web 2.0 (shown in Figure 1). Figure 1

shows the impact on organisational knowledge that

each technology sustains if it succeeds in its

implementation against the social input required to

present reliable results. Figure 2 shows a second

landscape overview which details the impact on

organisational knowledge over time after

deployment of Web 2.0 technologies (the landscape

overview in Figure 2 is based on views expressed in

papers at the literature review stage and expert

opinion). Attention must be given to the shape of the

curves and their relative value in Figure 2. The top

curve in Figure 2 represents the synergy achieved

through a joint implementation (when all of the

technologies are implemented simultaneously).

Figure 2: Landscape overview of Web 2.0 technologies

representing their impact on organisational knowledge

against the time after they have been deployed.

This research has identified the following

technology segment classifications relevant to Web

2.0:

 Corporate blogs

 Enterprise wikis

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 RSS platforms (Really Simple Syndication)

 Business networks

 Social bookmarking and tagging

 Office 2.0 tools

 On-line meetings

 Enterprise mash-ups

Each of these segments satisfies drivers and

presents constraints for an organisation wishing to

implement the technologies the segments categorise.

An organisation wishing to address strategic drivers

in its business must weigh up the following benefits

and constraints presented for each segment:

Corporate blogs

Drivers: information dissemination, thought

leadership initiatives, community building

Constraints: culture change required

Representative products: Blogger, MovableType,

WordPress.

Enterprise wikis

Drivers: bridge gap between knowledge and its

development, Consensus building.

Constraints: culture change required

Representative products: Wikipedia, JotSpot,

SocialText, Kwiki, Editme.

RSS platforms

Drivers: email overload

Constraints: security, message content

Representative products: Google Reader, Feed

Burner, Attensa, Newsgator, Knownow.

Business networks

Drivers: user interaction, time reduction

Constraints: social rather than business use,

employee acceptance

Representative products: Face book, LinkedIn,

Xing BC

Social bookmarking and tagging

Drivers: time reduction in searching

Constraints: security, no standardisation

Representative products: Del.icio.us, Dogear,

Cogenz, Connectbeam.

Office 2.0 tools

Drivers: outsourcing of common desktop software

Constraints: security, bandwidth constraints, some

features missing

Representative products: GoogleDocs, Zoho,

24SevenOffice.

On-line meetings

Drivers: time savings, cost reduction

Constraints: need still exists for face to face

meetings

Representative products: TeamSlide, WebEx,

PresenterNet.

Enterprise mashups

Drivers: encourages re-use and recombination

Constraints: no common format, lack of suitably

enabled data sources

Representative products: Datamashups, JackBe,

AboveAll.

4 INDUSTRIAL CASE STUDY

The industrial case study consisted of a profound

review of the organisations intranet in order to

discover the areas in which ‘Web 2.0’ capabilities

would provide business benefits in their deployment

and use in a corporate setting. The analysis and

recommendations were carried out at strategic level.

4.1 Portal ‘as-is’ Model

The following sections characterised the original

portal –

 People – each staff member had their own

self maintained profile page.

 Projects – all current and previous project

descriptions were available from a set of

pages generated from a database.

 Networks – provision of an on-line tool for

the user creation of a community of

practice.

 Insight – best practices and feedback were

recorded on this page, allowing for their

retrieval.

 Corporate – contained formal procedures,

policies and other corporate content.

4.2 Portal ‘to-be’ Model

The analysis was focused on delivering a set of

identified weaknesses in the portal and a set of

recommended solutions based on the potential of

‘Web 2.0’ and using both enterprise and user

focused web-based products. The results are listed

by the different ‘Web 2.0’ segments mentioned in

this paper.

News Customisation (RSS News Feeds). In the ‘as-

is’ portal there was limited scope for customisation

of the news service. The portal did not allow

subscriptions to either particular keywords, specific

news (depending on who was posting it), or external

news services such as journals, articles databases,

etc. It was suggested that the Google RSS reader

should be used due to its ability to organise, track

and share items based on keywords.

Incorporation of Social Bookmarking and a

Tagging Policy. The ‘as-is’ portal did not allow for

DRIVERS AND BARRIERS TO THE ADOPTION OF WEB 2.0

377

bookmarking. It was recommended that

bookmarking should become a feature of the ‘to-be’

portal. If the results have the capability of showing

which other users already have certain key words in

their bookmarking lists, it is likely that highlighted

users will possess other bookmarks relevant for that

search. The Cognez tool was recommended for this

task. It was also suggested that a policy should be

introduced for the tagging of discussion forum

threads.

Personal Network Capability. The ‘as-is’ portal

neglected to display the links between users of the

personal network facility. It was recommended that

a Social Network Analysis (SNA) tool should be

used to discover network hubs and key people inside

the organisation based on their network use.

Use of Wikis for Group Document Authorship. It

was recommended that the organisation should use a

wiki for the group authoring of documents such as

best practice guides where experts could add and

review document contents in an interactive fashion.

It was also recommended that this authoring method

could also be used for more formal documents. Such

documents require a final quality review by

definition, but group authorship through wiki

technology provides added value in a number of

cases:-

 Best practice documents elaborated

between colleagues in the same ‘skills

network’

 Technical documentation, user-case for

customer relationship management, project

life-cycle management among colleagues in

the same project team

 Job profile description developed among

colleagues from different departments

possibly located in different offices

 Contract development between the case

study organisation and its supply chain

partners

 Project requirements, specifications,

contract details etc. which may be

developed in collaboration between the

case study organisation and its customers

 White papers, strategic discussions, etc.

between the case study organisation and its

partners

Improvements on Email Management. It was

identified that employees in the case study

organisation experienced email overload. This

problem was seen as key, by the case study

organisation, creating difficulties in their

collaboration and communication processes.

Certainly the use of technologies such as RSS and

wikis (mentioned earlier in this section) can be used

to divert and manage a large amount of email traffic.

To address this it was suggested that the

organisation could utilise a social networking

platform, such as Face book to organise and filter a

large proportion of the email communication.

Limitations. It must be noted that there were a few

limitations encountered in the implementation of

these recommendations at the case study

organisation. For security purposes the case study

organisation limited the online methods for

communication between users. Instant messaging

was not allowed and blogging and media sharing

platforms were also limited. Also the introduction of

new email practices did not end the practice of group

emails.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The landscape overviews provided by this research

can help industrial organisations to better understand

the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 technologies

and drivers and constraints behind their adoption by

industry. Even with the continual evolution of

technology the principles behind the landscape

overviews remain relevant.

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oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html (Last

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Robinson, H.S., Carrillo, P., Anumba, C., and Al-

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