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.

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?)

I’m still processing all of the information from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Due to some connectivity hiccups, Gordon and I weren’t able to document our reactions as the events unfolded. The good news is that we’ve both had some time to mull things over.

Vendors on Parade

Most of the conference was dominated by product vendors. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for the two of us; we got to check out the competition. Most of the other attendees were hoping for insight into other aspects of Enterprise 2.0, though. You can do your vendor and product research anytime online.

I mentally classified the vendors at the booths downstairs into four categories:

1. The Old Guard. The usual enterprise software vendors, like OpenText, Microsoft, IBM, and EMC, touted their “2.0″ offerings. Their pitch was that E2.0 relies on a bunch of foundational technologies that are already present in the enterprise (and in their product stacks). Collaborative technologies are just another layer in your enterprise architecture. These vendors largely ignored the cultural and social implications of Enterprise 2.0.
2. The Barbarians at the Gates. The largest vendor contingent consisted of companies repackaging Web 2.0 tools for use within organizations. Some of them, like Socialtext, Atlassian, and Jive, had been around for a while. Others were young startups. Their pitch was that Web 2.0 had proven itself on the public web and could also be made to work inside organizations. While they embraced the cultural shifts, they didn’t address issues of legacy data or integration with existing systems and processes.
3. The Enablers. A handful of vendors showcased specific technologies. Veodia, for example, showed off their video streaming technology. Sun highlighted their series of embeddable social widgets. Their narrow focus made their pitches more cohesive, but it was hard to tell whether they expected to be bought by end users or OEM’d by the other vendors.
4. The Odd Ducks. At every conference, there’s always a few vendors that seem out of place. Often, they can tell you the most interesting stories. Sometimes, they leave you wondering what their marketing department was thinking. In the emerging Enterprise 2.0 market, there were quite a few ducks quacking, but I can’t say any of them made a real splash.

And Infovark? Where would we appear in this list? Well, considering our product isn’t for sale yet, we fall into the hidden fifth vendor category: The Silent Ones. We were there to listen and learn from the other attendees. We were one of the companies just doing market research, trying to gauge whether our solution and approach makes sense.

More Than a Trade Show

It’s unfortunate that nearly every conference devolves into a vendor showcase. In the case of Enterprise 2.0, I think it’s far too early for any vendor to claim that they have a solution. We haven’t finished defining the problem yet. Yes, Web 2.0 technology enables different communications paths and organizational structures, but what are these different channels good for? Are they more effective than traditional 1.0 approaches? My gut says that they are, but if we want to move beyond a tiny community of early adopters, we’ll need more than gut feelings to guide us.