The arrival of Gail Kelly at the helm of Westpac may accelerate the bank's adoption of "Web 2.0" tools such as blogs, wikis and social networks, allowing staff to share information freely and collaborate online.  The bank already has around 1000 user generated wikis (that is, online collaboration tools), has used the virtual environment Second Life as a training venue and allows staff to access Facebook from their work computers. Westpac chief information officer Simon Macnamara meanwhile is a veteran bank blogger. Unfortunately, the blog is for internal readers only. Westpac is acknowledged as the Web 2.0 leader among the big four banks, and chief technology officer David Backley believes it will prove a competitive advantage in terms of attracting and retaining key talent as well as opening new avenues for customer interactions. Speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney yesterday, Backley said that "Gail Kelly has a good track record and an open view of customer centricity. She is very positive on open communications and collaboration. "In the discussions I've had with her the way we will achieve that is through this technology." He acknowledged however that Kelly's perceived enthusiasm for Web 2.0 had yet to secure board approval and that some of the security and trust issues associated with Web 2.0 communications were "challenging". According to Ross Dawson, analyst and chairman of Future Exploration Network, which organised yesterday's forum, "Westpac is both the most public and most advanced" of the banks, although Australian enterprises did in general lag their international peers.  Describing Westpac's Web 2.0 initiatives as a "standout" locally, Dawson said that there were other pockets of activity in Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, NAB and Suncorp. He added, "The Savings and Loans SA CEO Greg Connor is a blogger and seeing significant value from it." There are precious few bank bloggers sharing their insights in the public domain. Westpac's Backley believes value will derive from using Web 2.0 tools to create more agile structures, able to respond quickly to market changes and demands. While in the past banks have focussed their IT attention on monolithic computing systems that automate repeatable financial processes such as mortgage or cheque processing, analysts believe that having such systems is now just the price of being in the game - they no longer provide any competitive edge. Competitive advantage will come instead from technologies that allow banks to take advantage of ad hoc opportunities - allowing employees to share information instantly, then work online collaboratively to develop products or services to take advantage of market opportunities as they arise. Backley sees the introduction of more Web 2.0 tools as critical in terms of making the bank's information systems more agile, and improving its ability to find and keep talent by "giving more power to the end user to do their job".  At the same time, "We've recently started to discuss not a multi-channel strategy but customer interactions. That twists it around from an IT perspective. There are a lot of different ways to collaborate and interact with customers,"