Early on, a variety of Web 2.0 applications, such as blogs, wikis, and social networks, were widely adopted by individual users; recently, these applications have attracted great attention from organizations, with the aim of driving innovations. Nonetheless, only a small number of different theoretical perspectives are available in the literature to facilitate a further understanding of the phenomenon of organizational adoption of Web 2.0 to drive innovation. Azua’s fascinating book fills this role. In fact, Azua goes beyond merely presenting a set of tools that practitioners and managers can use to improve their solutions and increase sales: she offers both a vision of and a perspective on the topics covered.

According to Azua, in chapter 1, the threefold alliance of “information overload created during the information age, [the] standardization of technology that has commoditized key conduits of communication, such as ... cell phones, and low-cost two-way Internet communication including wikis and other social networking tools” has led to the “social age” revolution--“the social age fundamentally changes the way we communicate, socialize, and collaborate to create a better world.” And right now, the social age, as the author maintains in chapter 2, has led to the rapid revaluation of traditional hierarchically grounded management models, choosing instead communities of employees. Such emerging groups that focus on specific tasks are a challenge to the traditional business models because of the interaction between service-oriented architectures (SOAs), which allow enterprises to leverage external services, and social networking. In fact, in chapter 3, Azua supports the thesis that increasing complexity, along with societal changes and economic pressures, has accelerated the adoption of blogs, wikis, and other social age tools. For instance, wikis pull information within communities of contributors, providing a way to “preserve the tacit (experiential) knowledge” that would otherwise be locked away in employees’ minds. Unlike wikis, blogs push information, following the classic long-tail demand curve--for example, a few blogs generate most of the traffic. However, as discussed in chapter 4, these different traffic patterns between blogs and wikis require careful information technology (IT) planning before implementation.

Another milestone of the social age, which is analyzed in chapter 5, pertains to “clouds of knowledge”--user-generated keywords and tags that are applied to content or people, contain services and information, are easily accessible everywhere, and represent the preferences, values, and associations of a community. Still, cloud computing is the subject matter of chapter 6. However, unlike the clouds in chapter 5, these are not clouds of knowledge, but virtualized boxes, providing hardware and software services to derive much more useful work “from the same amount of electricity consumed by most traditional data centers.” This would help reduce the amount of wasted IT energy--this is especially pertinent since the energy crisis and market forces keep demanding more IT cost efficiencies.

Chapter 7 takes care of the professional benefits of Internet-based tools, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, that are well-known examples of social media. To Azua, such tools can be used in marketing campaigns by effectively monitoring both conversations related to a product or company and phrases such as brand names or industry buzzwords.

Open-source tools, mobile devices, and three-dimensional (3D) worlds are other key topics that Azua addresses in chapters 8 to 12, with a special emphasis on key success factors for innovation programs, including appropriate implementation of social networking tools, business transparency, and a support structure. For instance, the amount of investments that should be allocated for transformation is a good barometer of the future success of a business; a reasonable balance is to allocate 45 percent of the IT budget to innovation and new capabilities and 55 percent to running the existing infrastructure. Still, innovation programs measure return on investment (ROI) through cost reduction metrics and reduced time to market for new products.

On the whole, Azua’s book codifies a series of best practices that are the product of her experiences as an IBM executive. This expertise becomes social capital in the pages of this book. In fact, the IBM case studies that are introduced are not a limitation of her vision, but represent empirical evidence from a favorite observatory--another unique aspect of this work. This book is suitable not only for practitioners, but also for students who wish to learn--or at least delve into--these topics, from an innovative point of view.