Dion Hinchiffe authored an essential post on the State of Enterprise 2.0. It’s less a survey of Enterprise 2.0 technologies or vendors than a survey of the state of adoption among mainline businesses. Some key insights I gleaned from the article include:

• Enterprise 2.0 is more about a change in mindset than a particular set of technologies. Enterprise 2.0 products are social tools, and cultural change accompanies their use.
• Organizations will find these tools proliferating throughout their enterprises, due to low barriers to adoption. Remember that much of Enterprise 2.0 was piloted on the Internet. The designers of those tools knew that the only reason their applications achieved wide adoption was because they were easy to use and solved customer problems. (Even if the problem is something trivial, like what my friends are doing right now.)
• Enterprise 2.0 technologies tend not to displace existing IT investments, but to add value to them. This is largely due to the grassroots adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools, but also with making participation in online communities optional. Join if you want, contribute if you want, but nobody can force you to do so. (In fact, as the FASTforward blog points out, it’s rare to find firms that aren’t actively standing in the way of Enterprise 2.0 adoption.)

Head over to the ZDNet blogs and have a look.

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Gordon and I jokingly call infovark an “N-complete” enterprise. We do this for two reasons.

1. We’re nerds. We think about math stuff like np-complete problems for fun.
2. We use most of the open source N* tools available today in our software development process. We’re nerds.

This means NUnit, NCover, NDoc, and NAnt. For the non-nerdy, these are frameworks that help developers manage unit tests, determine code coverage for said unit tests, document our code, and automate our build process. We bring all the tools together using SharpDevelop. (Though I do miss Microsoft’s Visual Studio a bit.)

Why use all of these tools? As a small software development shop, the most important thing for us is to manage our time properly. As Joel on Software pointed out, multitasking developers face context switching costs. Revisiting our code after the fact to write automated test cases or add documentation is a huge time-wasting exercise. It’s much better to do these things while we’re down in the weeds, working with the bits and bytes. Having the N* suite running within our IDE makes us much more productive.

We think being our own testers and tech writers gives us better quality code as well. After all, the person writing the code is best equipped to describe what it does and the most likely ways it could break. It makes sense to do these tasks ourselves as long as we can minimize the switching costs.

Our thanks to all the open source developers that worked on these tools. We wouldn’t get far without you. And thanks as well to the FxCop team, whose code security tool is a real godsend. (But couldn’t you guys have named it N-something?)

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I’m really fond of our logo. It conveys all of the attributes we want for our software: friendly, helpful, simple, and organic. Both Gordon and I are determined to make usability one of our primary concerns, and the logo is an inspiration. Our thanks go to the designers at Logoworks, who took our vague ideas and turned them into the graphic you see below.

Figure 1: The Infovark logo.

Over the next week or so, we’ll rework the website to reflect the infovark color palette and style elements. Stay tuned.

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We spent days coming up with the name infovark.

Yes, really.

Naming a company or a product is harder than you might think. It’s tough to find an interesting, unique and concise name that expresses the goals of the project in a memorable way. We consulted the Name Inspector, Vitamin, and Guy Kawasaki’s blog for help. The global nature of the Internet and the importance of keyword search means that most of the obvious — and not so obvious — company names and domain names have already been registered.

After much brainstorming and headscratching, we turned to the Dotomator in desperation. We entered all sorts of words and phrases we thought expressed our company’s unique vibe. No luck. We tried nonsense words, a la jabberwocky. We tried swapping prefixes and suffixes. Then, as a joke, we started randomly combining bits of these words with colors, numbers, and animals in classic Web 2.0 style. One of the sillier results was “infovark.”

After we stopped laughing, we spent hours looking for something better. But we kept making dumb jokes about infovark. No matter what else we tried, nothing felt quite right. With misgivings, we grabbed the domain for a boring corporate name instead. We gave ourselves email accounts. But it was infovark that captured our attention.

Ultimately, we decided that despite it being a bit weird, infovark was the most memorable of all the names we tried. So that’s what stuck.

Now that we’ve had a chance to reflect a bit, it’s not a bad choice. It turns out that few things dig faster than an aardvark. It’s a great metaphor for search, one of the key technologies of Enterprise 2.0. And since we’re a company that makes software for knowledge workers, we liked the idea of having an animal that roots around for tasty morsels as a mascot. Besides, who can resist the consonance between knowledge workers and infovarkers?

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