Imagine a world in which a movie search on your phone turns up only the kind of movies you like, and only those playing in your neighborhood; your behavior and interactions on social networks automatically produce lists of recommendations, potential friends, even job offers; searching and browsing the web becomes vastly more interesting and efficient, with results and link suggestions tailored specifically to your interests, and your “virtual representative,” a kind of online personal assistant, keeps working to find you the best information even when you are offline.
This is the world of web 3.0, or what we call the ‘transcendent web’, and it will bring profound changes to people and businesses alike. The benefits it will provide users include the creation of a much more personalized web experience and the automation of many of the services already in use. Businesses too, will benefit from vastly greater amounts of information about consumers and thus the opportunity to market and sell to them much more directly. They will also be able to take advantage of the greater operational efficiencies brought about by technologies that will keep people, processes and products much more tightly connected. The transcendent web will play a critical role in the digitization of industries as wide-ranging as telecommunications, financial services and healthcare.
The transcendent web is still on the horizon, but it is critical that companies understand what is coming, and how it will affect their businesses, if they hope to take full advantage of what it will offer.
Web 3.0 will build on the kinds of applications and services that have proved so popular in the past few years. Recommendation engines will produce much more complete and targeted information, based on a greater knowledge of the habits and preferences of users.
Search engines will become much more precise, taking context and wording into account in generating their results. And services will arise that enable users to create avatars to perform all these functions for them, automatically, depending on highly specific preferences.
These kinds of services will depend on new web technologies that are significantly more intelligent than current standards.
The Social Web: Social networking will continue to be a mainstay of the transcendent web. Indeed, much of the activity on web 3.0 will take place within the context of social media, as the connections among like-minded people become strengthened, reenforced and multiplied.
The Semantic Web: The semantic web will understand on a considerably deeper level the meaning of the search terms people use, and the context in which they are used. This in turn will enable far better results when searching and generating recommendations on the web.
The Internet of Things: More and more things are being made Internet-enabled — houses, cars, appliances, even clothing — allowing them not just to be located through technologies like radio frequency identification but to communicate richer amounts of information about themselves; all of this becomes not just possible but also visible to web users.
Artificial intelligence: Ultimately, the transcendent web will depend on a high level of artificial intelligence underlying many web processes. Using inputs from different sources, including browsing history, user-specified preferences and contextual information such as location, these systems will profile users to better understand both the content and the context of their requests.
The Impact of the Transcendent Web
As web 3.0 comes into being, its effect on both users and businesses will be profound. It will change how people work and play, and how companies use information to market and sell their products, and operate their businesses.
The huge increase in user data, behavior and preferences offers marketeers a great opportunity to attract more consumers to their websites, target their efforts to particular consumers, gather more information about those consumers and use that information more efficiently.
To do so, they must prepare to take advantage of the coming ‘semantic web’, optimizing their websites by embedding them with search engine–friendly, structured, semantic data to increase traffic. When Best Buy embedded semantics into the descriptions of its online products in 2009, describing not just the product, but also accessories, delivery and payment options, and warranty conditions, its site traffic increased by 30 percent.
Advertising too, will be transformed, as businesses come to understand and take advantage of behavioral advertising, in which the kinds of ads placed on websites will depend on highly specific information about who is visiting the site. The result will be a large boost in online sales, as companies learn how to target those consumers most likely to purchase their products.
The impact of the transcendent web will also allow companies to reexamine their entire organizational structures, business and governance processes, supply chains and product innovation efforts. What’s more, they will be able to further automate many processes, promote better communication among employees and enable far more efficient manufacturing, supply chain and inventory management practices, as parts, machines and finished products are linked together in the growing ‘internet of things’.
Enhanced customer feedback will allow companies to boost innovation and continuously improve product quality.
“The impact of the transcendent web will allow companies to reexamine their entire organizational structures, business and governance processes, supply chains and product innovation efforts”
Getting Ready for the Transcendent Web
Many critical elements of the transcendent web have yet to be put in place. We expect, however, that the effort to implement them will accelerate through the coming decade.
The evolution of the transcendent web will take time, but companies should not take that as an excuse to wait and see what it will look like once it is finished. Organizations need to begin now to build the capabilities that will be key to reaping those benefits.
Open up to the Internet world: Ensure that every critical business system is open and ready to interface in a secure way with external systems over Internet protocols.
Move to real time: Convert business systems from today’s often asynchronous data management operating models to real-time analytics and processing.
Structure your data: Move to structure all of your company’s data so that it can be used in different ways both internally and externally by your business partners. This will require the automation of tagging to provide for how data is managed and searched in context.
Develop your people: Create a plan to ensure that your company has the skills needed to take advantage of today’s needs and tomorrow’s opportunities. Keep in mind that the skills required will extend beyond the technology department to encompass the entire organization.
Involve your customers: If you have not done so already, start now to move your customers from a passive, “lean-back” approach to a more active, “lean-forward” attitude. Stimulate an active online dialogue about your products and services, then capture the information produced and use it to further refine your products and services, and to enhance your marketing activities.
Each stage of the journey will bring benefits, and the companies that begin planning now will reap those incremental benefits and be that much better prepared when all the pieces are in place.
KARIM SABBAGH is senior partner and the global leader for the Communications, Media and Technology Practice at Booz & Company; OLAF ACKER is a partner, DANNY KARAM a senior associate and JAD RAHBANI an associate with Booz & Company
