A good question posed at another session at today’s Web 2.0 Strategies conference. Speaker, Simon Wardley, an independent consultant, explained the ins and outs of business competitiveness and how we now inhabit a world of web 2.0.

Apart from the humorous use of fighting kittens pictured within his presentation, it all worked to show us how we got here and where we might be heading next. While I would love to detail how Wardley laid this all out in his 200 plus slides (trust me - it worked) time does not permit, so I will outlined a couple of the more central points.

In a somewhat roundabout way of explaining why all of the web 2.0 phenomena is actually quite important to organisations, Wardley  outlined the process of commoditisation; “yesterday’s exciting hot things, becoming today’s normal, commonplace and boring items”. There is always a pressure for commoditisation to happen he said, as everyone wants that competitive advantage. To my mind its similar to those kittens all chasing after an infinite ball of unravelling string. If they stop chasing they inevitably get further and further behind and eventually go out of business.

Web 1.0 became commoditised said Wardley referring to Nick Carr’s ideas that whereas once IT was all about getting bigger and better tech than your competitors to gain advantage, it is now just an accepted cost of business. IT has/is shifting from product to service in its nature and this has had a massive influence on the innovation and evolution of technology within it.

Enter Web 2.0 which embodies the notion of service within it. The move of IT to service-based industry only serves to encourage innovative technologies that you see in what we call web 2.0. As web 2.0 becomes evermore commoditised and commonplace, consider what will be next. for example if you are playing with "web 3.0" technology which is still very much in it innovative stage you can identify three pointers about it. One, that at the moment there is a scarcity of information about it – no case studies for example, second there are a lack of competitors out there (or they are few and far between), lastly, anything new you do will be expensive and therefore risky.

As an information professional it may be of some worth knowing that the latest tech you have been playing with outside of work might just be the next thing your organisation needs to stay ahead of the game. Let them know, what you know about.