Infovark

I have a confession.

I am starting to really hate the word “enterprise”.

The problem with the term enterprise is that it is an abstraction. An enterprise isn’t something you can see, touch, or work with directly. The adjectives that get applied to the word are themselves disconnected abstractions: an effective enterprise, a dysfunctional enterprise, an innovative enterprise. What do these things really mean? Aren’t they just wishy-washy arm-wavy generalizations?

Enterprises are everywhere, and yet, they are nowhere. When you talk to your bank teller, you are “interfacing with an enterprise”. But really, you’re talking to a person. You can’t hold the person responsible for the entire enterprise. (This fact has been wonderfully exploited by bureaucracy for decades now.)

Web 2.0 brought the individual into the world of the Internet. This revolution — like most others – was about bringing power to the people. Users add value to the web. Every URL is a latent community. Wikipedia, YouTube, and Flickr bring us content that we made for ourselves. Self-organizing groups. The freedom to share and discuss and annotate. This democratization changed the way people used the Internet and changed the way they interacted with each other. (props to Clay Shirky)

If we want to change the way people work, we have to give up on this notion of “the enterprise” as the thing that needs to change. We have to stop focusing on abstractions like Enterprise Content Management and Business Intelligence. We can’t claim to bring more “Collaboration“, more “Innovation” or more “Social” into the enterprise. These things are intangible, hard to see, hard to measure, and largely irrelevant to the problems at hand.

Trying to bring about change at the abstract level is impossible. What ends up being sold is a utopian ideal. No wonder most of these projects fail — they’re designed entirely in fairyland.

What we need to do is get back to reality. Let’s tell the architecture astronauts to come home.

Enterprises are made of people.

A tip from Mikal sent us browsing to Startup Warrior. It’s a mashup that uses the TechCrunch database and Google Maps to plot hotspots of tech activity.

ValleyWag reported the ten most concentrated tech regions.

All the usual suspects were there: Palo Alto, San Francisco, Mountain View, New York, Austin, Vancouver. Northern Virginia didn’t make the cut, though Infovark is listed.

On the positive side, we can now definitively state that we are THE best startup within a ten-block radius of the post office in Oakton, Virginia. That’s not something everyone can claim.

One of the stranger keynotes at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference was given by Rishi Chandra, the Product Director for Google Enterprise. I expected the head of Google’s Enterprise division to spend his time talking about Google Docs, GTalk, Gmail for the enterprise, the recent launch of Google Sites, or any of the half dozen or so applications Google offers. Instead, he spent nearly all his time talking about the benefits of storage in the cloud.

Many attendees at the conference shrugged. They’d heard the cloud pitch from Google before. But the talk struck me as odd for a few reasons:

1. Storage in the cloud is an outsourcing play targeted at CIOs and IT department heads, but the Enterprise 2.0 conference is focused on bringing Web 2.0 tools to typical knowledge workers.
2. Storage in the cloud is all about outsourcing your datacenter. That’s great from a bottom-line cost reduction perspective, but Enterprise 2.0 is about the top line — making employees more productive.

Maybe Google’s working on something cool they can’t talk about yet. Or maybe Google doesn’t have a real Enterprise 2.0 story. Yet for some reason, Google decided to show up at the conference anyway, and talk about infrastructure.
Microsoft, IBM and Sun were all there, on hand to show off their social computing solutions. What’s up with Google?

One of the recurring themes at E2.0 Last week was the notion of Generational Adoption. It’s the idea that Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y all had an innate relationship with various ways of working, and that these different work habits are a major factor in the adoption of new technology. Jay Hariani at the e2.oh blog has a nice wrap up of the generational adoption meme. Since then, Ross Mayfield, Jeff Nolan, and Larry Dignan have all chimed in, with various cases for and against.

I was lucky enough to share a drink last week with with Rob Salkowitz, Author of Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap, who was presenting at the E2.0 conference. I haven’t read Rob’s book yet, but In the wake of our conversation, I am definitely going to check it out. (Venkat’s Review over on RibbonFarm is also a good read).

The Millenials Are Coming is the new Y2K Bug

I have big problems with using the generational argument to drive adoption of Enterprise 2.0. It feels like another vendor-inspired bogeyman designed to convince companies to buy heaps of software they don’t need. (Install our compliance software or Sarbanes-Oxley will get you!)

The notion that the millennials are going to “demand” some kind of “Facebook” to do their work is just plain rubbish. Think about when you joined the workforce. What exactly did you demand?

When I first left school for the workforce, I wasn’t in a position to demand anything. It took me five years of working within the system before I realized which parts were broken. And it was only because I’d put in the time working within the system that I was trusted to actually influence things a bit.

Generational change happens gradually. There’s not going to be some giant “MySpace Revolution” where “The Kids” take over with their externally hosted collaborative tools. Instead, these people will join the workplace as wide-eyed and impressionable new starters, and they’ll do their best to work within the framework that they are given with the tools that are allocated to them. Then, slowly, their own ideas will become part of the way people work, including their favorite tools and technologies.

Sure, the generational issue is interesting from an anthropological perspective. It’s indicative of a lot of things, most notably progress in society. But as a call to arms for business to rush out and spend cash on some new-fangled social media tool for your enterprise, it leaves a lot to be desired.

(But hey, what would I know. I’m just a disgruntled Gen X’er who has no respect for authority, right?)