Web 2.0 will change Business Sector interactions

It's quite some time ago but most of us will remember the time that your company introduced it's first intranet. With it your company got a private and affordable computer network that used Internet protocols and network connectivity to securely share any part of an organization's information or operational systems with its employees. From that moment colleagues could cooperate much more efficient, regardless allocation and time zone.

Then we got exposed to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) in the 90's which refers to the structured transmission of data between organizations by electronic means. It was more than mere E-mail; for instance, organizations might replace bills of lading and even checks with appropriate EDI messages. Costly and time consuming ICT projects to link individual companies with it's customers and/or suppliers and merely interesting for organisations that transfered huge amounts of data at their supply chain.

And now we have web 2.0 that simply means massive user participation via the web. For the first time in marketing, your customer, prospect, supplier and any other participant can communicate, interact, co-produce straightforward back with you and many others. According Wikipedia Web 2.0 is a living term describing changing trends in the use of internet technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and its hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.

We see an important trend that information, innovation, business networking and knowledge sharing practices are re-shaped at Business Sector level by Web 2.0 implementations like Groenweb.nl and several projects at the Dutch Agricultural Sector like Melkvee Academie and VarkensNET. Another principle that counts: the winner takes it all - so don't wait too long if you have Business Sector ambitions. Feel free to contact me if you are interested to talk over opportunities.

Andre Maljaars (46) is founder and managing partner at www.leaderboard.nl - a company that is specialised at Web 2.0 implementations.