A Walk in the Cloud

Perhaps no technology buzzword has engendered as much discussion in records management circles as Web 2.0. It’s been hailed as everything from the solution to all of our information management problems to the death of records management as a discipline. It’s been the target of extensive discussion on a number of records-related e-mail lists, including those based in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. And it’s even the subject of a book by Steve Bailey, Managing the Crowd: Rethinking Records Management for the Web 2.0 World. (See related review of this book under "In Review.") But what is Web 2.0 and why should organizations care about it?

Patrick Cunningham, CRM, and Jesse Wilkins, CDIA+

The ‘Cloud’ as the Web 2.0 Foundation “Web 2.0” has at least as many definitions as “records.” Tim O’Reilly, publisher of O’Reilly Media and widely credited with coining the term, definesWeb 2.0 as:

"… the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them (emphasis added)."

In other words, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and applications like them are successful precisely because they get better as more people use them, whether to create information or merely to consume it. This is already making an impact on the way organizations create information – and must be understood in order for organizations to manage the information that is being created. Web 2.0 tools generally provide three main classes of functionality, regardless of the specific capabilities of the tool:

1. The Web as Platform: The application and the data it creates reside “in the cloud,” hosted by a third party. It is generally accessed through a web browser – and may not be available at all in the absence of Internet access or if the application provider goes down.

2. Participation: The tools make it easy to create content by hiding or eliminating complexity. Google Docs and Zoho
Write don’t offer anything near the capabilities of Microsoft Word, but they offer enough capabilities for most users and in most circumstances. Similarly, blogs and wikis make it easy for users to create and consume content or collaborate.

3. Emergence: Web 2.0 tools allow users to create their own content with few or no rules or restrictions. Instead
of saving information into enterprise repositories with access controls and rigid taxonomies, users can simply create, save, and publish their work in the manner most useful to them. Users are not required to declare and classify records according to file plans and retention schedules, but can simply “tag” their documents with keywords that they can use later to find them.

Organizations are looking at Web 2.0 tools for several reasons. The first reason, of course, is that they are the latest
buzzword. Whether it’sWeb 2.0 in general, or specific tools like blogs, wikis, and social networking, Web 2.0 is frequently featured in technology trade and mainstream business publications. All vendors tout their Web 2.0 applications.

They tend to be lower cost, at least initially, and many Web 2.0 applications are free for personal or small-office use, which makes them useful for pilot projects. They allow easy collaboration across time and geography. And many users, particularly those who are just entering the workforce, have ready access to them and are comfortable with them already.

This last point speaks to the relatively rapid acceleration of growth of acceptance of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace. Much like personal computers entered the workplace when end users began to acquire them in large quantities, many of the applications and services in the cloud are coming to the enterprise through end users who identify needs and solutions that can be met by tools and services with which they are already very familiar. The primary value proposition for Web 2.0 is reduced cost.

Much like commercial records centers have displaced in-house records centers for many organizations, moving data and applications to the cloud takes the real estate and operational costs out of the equation for many IT departments. Storage and computing power can scale to meet the need of the moment. An organization does not need to build in capacity for peak periods, incurring costs for resources that are consumed only on a part-time basis. In addition, the organization is not continually chasing the storage capacity curve.

See "Web 2.0 Benefits & Considerations" by Jesse Wilkins.

See "Web 2.0 Issues & Risks" by Patrick Cunningham.

From January - February 2009