Defining "community" in the Enterprise
May 5, 2008 – 1:03 amJavier Lozano, a Microsoft MVP, asks “How do we define community?”:
[A]re there channels or ways to reach to people in the enterprise? If so, is there a problem with providing greater reach? And if not, how can we create such channels?
Then in a comment, Javier further asks:
For some time now, I’ve been wondering what “enterprise” means…is it a real thing or just a buzzword?
Javier’s questions, initially directed toward a perceived dearth of MVPs who work in the “enterprise,” lead him to a more overarching question: what does enterprise mean, and how can we define the people who work in the enterprise?
Strictly speaking, an enterprise is any business, whether it’s a one-person floral shop or a huge automobile manufacturing company. But when we’re talking about the enterprise in the context of IT, we’re looking at enterprise on a different scale. The extent of that scale depends on your own perceptions, but I think most people think “big company” when they think “enterprise.”
The enterprise extends across an entire organization, encompassing all the business units/divisions/subsidiaries/etc, driving the success of the business as a whole. That is to say, the enterprise includes HR, legal, IT, product development, sales, consulting, and everything else the company does and makes.
Enterprise-as-a-buzzword refers to the cottage industry of software, services, and support contracts that has sprung up, hanging onto the coattails of the enormous mainstays like Oracle and IBM. That enterprise is the magic market where money is to be made. Companies scramble to create products and services to enable ITIL/Six Sigma/CMM/security/performance/scalability (up *and* out!)/IT governance/Zachman Framework/agile engagement/etc. This is the “Enterprise” you’ll read about in InfoWorld and hear about from the Salesforce.com testimonials.
Enterprise IT is a heterogeneous mix of processes, tools, products, and services that (hopefully) align together to facilitate lower cost of operation and maximum availability of systems. The people who work in that enterprise–the folks Javier is wondering about–are software developers, testers, QA analysts, business analysts, system administrators, architects, project managers, risk managers, program managers, schedulers, and so on. These are the people who sort of “disappear” into the back office and don’t have the time to log on to microsoft.* newsgroups and help people with their questions about business process management in Visual Studio Team System. All of these folks serve a customer, which is the enterprise itself: all the folks who work for the company, and all the customers the company serves.
In my opinion, the best way Microsoft can reach out to enterprise IT is via Microsoft Consulting. If an MCS consultant is engaged, he or she can identify areas where the MVP designation can be awarded. That will likely require Microsoft to expand the scope of the MVP designation a bit, since the enterprise people will be mainly providing value within the enterprise itself.
Outside of that, Microsoft will have to continue to look at blogs (shameless plug!) and publications from those of us who live in the enterprise. As long as Microsoft can learn how to establish a value system for the work we do, we can provide a way for them to identify it.
