Bloggers and Enterprise

I just read a great article, Multiple Architectures For Mobility by Daniel Taylor. The part that really hit home with me was this,

"How can there be positive press about a set of technologies that customers don't exactly want, aren't buying in droves and have few plans for? It's a very simple disconnect between markets. FMC and VoIP have a great deal more appeal for small businesses than they do for enterprises. But most analysts, editors and bloggers don't work in enterprises; they're in the SOHO and SMB environments."

This is so true, and i'd extend it to new hires also. I couldn't tell you how many times i've sat in a go no where meeting with someone who came in from a much smaller company. They have all these ideas that just aren't going to work when your talking about the enterprise. Most of them require resources that are just not available, and then when you bring up roadmaps and CMMi the meetings turn into a barage of "what ifs". I heard them say that they would build it and then you have to talk about support. Are they going to come in at 1am on a friday night if it's down? Of course they want IT to handle it, but then IT only support apps they build or third-party apps with a 24/7 support structure which then tends to lead back to roadmaps, rinse, repeat.

I've been watching blogs about Enterprise 2.0 and I see most of it as being a bit to optimistic. Usually it never takes into account HR issues, where some of these apps can be distruptive to corporate culture if not handled right. My views might be skewed because I've worked for the same company for ten years and usually the cutting edge stuff is more like a butter knife when we get around to implementing it. We'll get to Enterprise 2.0 some time when Enterprise 3.0 is said to be here.