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Just when you're starting to "get" the principles of Web 2.0 and craft an Enterprise 2.0 strategy, it's already time to reflect on what's coming next. Web 2.0 isn't really about technology enablement, but about consumer participation. And Enterprise 2.0 is less about rich user interfaces, blogging, and social networks than about empowering customers to interact electronically around your products and business. As CIO, you can't limit your thinking to providing E-empowerment tools; it's your job to wire your entire business so your end customers' goals drive your business priorities.

As I discussed Optimize's February issue, E-enablement of customers is a powerful catalyst. It will likely force you to refocus your strategy on meeting customers' outcomes and delivering their ideal experiences. Additionally, improving the operational metrics your customers care about—for example, growing the value of their financial assets, delivering their health and fitness outcomes, ensuring that you can deliver the right products in the right place at the right time, and reducing downtime—will drive alignment and priorities among your stakeholders.

Tim O'Reilly and his team have done a wonderful job of evangelizing the principles of Web 2.0. Let's extend that thinking to the next phase, which I call Biz 3.0. At that stage, customers will lead us beyond an engaged Web strategy to a business strategy that's driven by customer outcomes. Here are the guiding principles I see emerging:

• Give customers control and visibility over their products, progress, projects, and information. Show them how they're doing compared with others' aggregated benchmarks.
• Help your customers achieve ideal outcomes. Replicate successful patterns to improve the customer experience for everyone.
• Nourish communities and promote customers' specialized applications of your products and services.
• Enable simple, intelligent services that can combine dynamically to address customers' complex and changing needs.
• Adapt to the customer's context as he or she shifts across time, space, and touch points.
• Syndicate your customer-empowering services ubiquitously so they show up anywhere the customer may be.
• Distribute and promote toolkits for customers to extend and design solutions that let them leverage your domain knowledge while applying their own contextual expertise to meet their needs.
• Make iterative customer co-design a standard approach to product, service, and process innovation and evolution.

This is the first in a three-part series.

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