It has been 235 years since Adam Smith identified the importance of specialisation, now mass collaboration is taking the potential for innovation to a new level.  

A few years ago you did have to be a techy to run on Open Source, now it's relatively easy. SMEs should make the most of it.

Interoperability is emerging as the key to making Web 2.0 transferable to the corporate environment.

There have been countless discussions on how consumer expectations set by Web 2.0 are being transferred to the workplace. Based on working with Web 2.0, users increasingly expect to exert more control over their work experiences and to participate in them. They expect business applications to adjust to the way they work, rather than accept a suboptimal experience. This we know.

Ultimately, Web 2.0 is not really about the technology. It's about social networks and users' control of their experience. The way to achieve this movement of power to the end user in the enterprise is through a composite solution that meshes software, services and the web and considers the business user as well as the developer.

Composite applications are the business users' equivalent of Web 2.0 and mash-ups. They provide a mechanism for multiple technology vendors to participate in a solution that, in its simplest form, decouples information from line-of-business (LOB) applications like CRM or ERP and surfaces it in a more usable way.