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I really got a kick out of Jevon’s Enterprise 2.0 Drag Queens post. Watching a company trying to be something that it’s not is a bit sad, but in a comical way. On the eve of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I thought it might be time to stop and think a bit about “Enterprise 2.0″, which is really quite a horrid name for something so important.
As corny as it may be, the thing that I really like about the label is the “2.0″. It sounds as though it’s a new release of the Enterprise. But-why do we need a new Enterprise? The old one still works, right?
Well, yeah. But also no. Things have changed. And the changes have happened subtly – to the foundations of the way we work.
If you take any department in your organization, you will find two common elements. These are Information Management, and Communication.
It doesn’t matter what department it is. HR, Finance, Operations, Marketing -all they are doing is storing and retrieving information, and selectively passing it on to people – customers, colleagues, and other organizations. ( I realise this is a pretty high-level abstraction, but stay with me for a while. The view’s really nice up here 
)
Most of the principles – the “best practices” around optimizing organizations deal explicitly with these two elements. That’s what’s kept management consultants getting paid so much for so long. That’s what brought us Business Process Management, and Automated Workflow, and Process Re-engineering. Structuring and refining information management and communication processes. That’s it.
(See – what good is a high level abstraction if you can’t make sweeping generalizations?)
But while we were busy with flowcharts and telephone systems, the fundamental assumptions of those two disciplines changed. And it was the internet that changed them.
The 1.0 Rules of Communication
The 1.0 Rules of Information Management
None of these things are true anymore.
That’s why we need the 2.0. That’s why our tools need to change. The foundations that we built our organizations on are not the same.
(And perhaps that’s why it’s funny when the guys who have years of 1.0 experience behind them cram their burly legs into the silk stockings and the whip out the lipstick…)
ReadWriteWeb, (the most impossible web site to actually say aloud), carries a great article this morning on Zappos – an online shoe company that has dived, boots and all into Twitter.
The tweets of every Zappos employee, including the CEO, can be found aggregated on the company web site.
I think this is a really inspired piece of thinking. Twitter allows me to see that the company is made up of people — real people, with thoughts and feelings, and senses of humor. It allows a transparent view into the company, which tells me that Zappos must actually trust and value it’s employees. (Hey — It even made me want to write this blog post about them).
There was a time when the most important thing a CEO did was to constantly present a “professional business” approach to the community. Zappos’ CEO, on the other hand, is apparently having troubles getting his pants to stay on.
Is that going to hurt sales? is it going to be ‘bad for business’?
Nope. In fact, I bet it does just the opposite.
(Dean and I are so busy right now, that we don’t update as much as we should, but you can find us on twitter too – we’d love to hear from you!)
Gordon discovered a tiny URL stuck to the bottom of our new rubber friend.
Clicking on it seemed to have no effect, so we decided to type http://www.ifoundtheaardvark.com into a web browser. It appears that our new mascot is a collective art project! The website has a few broken links, and the forum hasn’t been updated in a while, but the project claims to have “no end”. Maybe we’ll post our corporate logo to the art gallery.
Viral Marketing is an interesting thing. A small rubber aardvark from an art project sponsored by a community newspaper in Southeastern Massachusetts wound up in a startup software company in Northern Virginia by way of my aunt and uncle living in Eastern Georgia. And that’s just the motion of a physical object. Think how much further and faster word of mouth can travel. It’s encouraging to have evidence of how far an idea can spread.
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.
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?