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.

We arrived here in Boston tired, and pretty scruffy looking after the red-eye train from DC. But, we made it!

We just missed an interesting sounding opening presentation from Rob Carter from FedEx - it looks like FedEx are making extensive use of the web, facebook and blogs and wikis both within and external to their organization.

Sean Dennehy and Don Burke then presented a great seession on their work at the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s knowledge sharing ability has been greatly enhanced since they deployed their “intellipedia” - a mediawiki implementation that allows CIA staff to edit and share information freely, and without editorial regulation.

My favourite quote from Sean - “Wikis don’t work in theory - they only work in practice”

Other than removing the ability to make anonymous edits, not much was changed by the CIA when they launched intellipedia, last year.  They claim also to have a much higher contribution rate (Wikipedia has a markedly low percentage of users who actually edit it - often guessed at about 1-3%) - but they are still working with the early adopters - intellipedia hasn’t been wholly rolled out to the entire organization.

“A culture problem - not a technology problem”

Don mentioned that there was substantial resistance to their efforts to incorporate this crazy wiki thing into their business. Primary benefit comes from working at the broadest audience possible. The wiki approach also focuses more on topic than on organizational structure - it means that the point tends to be on content, rather than process. That’s a really good thing.

” But - I don’t have time to edit this intellipedia thing”

Don and Sean seem adamant that the best way to deal with this kind of response is for people to stop writing emails and documents, and start writing intellipedia articles instead. (I suspect that that’s going to be a friction point for them. People don’t like new ideas very much. )

All in all, this was a great session - intellipedia seems set to be a great success.

Joel Spolsky posted an hilarious rant about storage in the cloud. You should read it. I’ll wait.

Joel is upset because the software industry heavyweights are chasing the dream. You know the dream. It’s the dream of every management consultant, technophile and (in Joel’s words) architecture astronaut. The dream comes in many different guises. In various times, in various places, the dream has lured many to destruction — or at least to waste gobs of money and years of effort.

I call it One System to Rule Them All.

It’s the utopian idea that with enough effort you can craft an all-encompassing solution for a vast array of problems using a single, perfect framework. This year’s flavor of the dream happens to be storage in the cloud, or perhaps the belief that click-based advertising can fund everything. A few years ago, solid, respectable banking types had subscribed to the dream of the New Economy. A real estate agent once assured me that house prises in Northern Virginia never fell.

Well, never say never.

Godel’s incompleteness theorem says that all but the simplest mathematical systems will fail internal consistency tests. Most grand theories contain the seeds of their own destruction.

Most organizations of significant size will have hybrid system architectures. No single office suite, operating platform, or synchronized filing system can accomplish everything. One size doesn’t fit all, nor should it. Vive la différence.

Sam Lawrence has a new post up about how social software could dethrone the big guys. Sam references the photographic industry, and how the big guys at Kodak ended up being a niche player in the new global digital photography age.

Like Kodak a decade ago, today’s enterprise software giants have a lot of legacy to overcome if they want to join the social software revolution. They’ll find it difficult to integrate emergent systems with the rules engines that drive their enterprise platforms. In many ways, those two approaches are polar opposites.

Of course, the big players have a lot of resources and talent at their disposal. (As two guys in a basement, we’re acutely aware of that!) But do they also have the vision and the will to reinvent themselves?