In just about every business, organizational activities and practices continually evolve, driven by competition between the various actors (such as customers,
companies and industries).  Most of these changes are small and incremental, but occasionally things must change dramatically in response to new technologies, new players or the disruption of existing business models.  Understanding how your key activities and practices are evolving is essential for sound organizational planning.

Last year, our research in this domain focused on describing the overall lifecycle of business activities, as yesterday’s new ideas become today’s best practices and tomorrow’s commodity systems.  Over the last six months, we have sought to apply these concepts directly to the management of Enterprise IT.  Our hypothesis was that today’s Web 2.0 leaders – Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com et al – would be the best place to look for important new IT management activities and practices.  While these companies are, understandably, often secretive about their operational innovations, this report highlights how these firms manage IT and the implications for more traditional enterprises.

Read/comment on Simon Wardley's Learning from Web 2.0 blog posts here.