Month of December, 2007

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a company an “enterprise, “ and I’d love to say I’ve cracked that one. I’m sure Wikipedia could serve up a compelling distinction, but I don’t have access to Wikipedia right at the moment. Because I’m typing this on my laptop, somewhere over the Atlantic ,en route to Ireland.



So I’ll focus instead on what makes an organization a “Virtual Enterprise” or “Enterprise 2.0” or a “Small Virtual Enterprise (SVE).” I’d like to trademark that last one as it’s probably going to get used quite a bit by me in future posts. To me a virtual enterprise is highly distributed; flexible in how and where work is conducted; composed of a core group of employees who in turn manage the output of a team of specialists. Those specialists are not employees (but they may play one on TV). A virtual enterprise can respond very quickly to changing needs (internally) and market conditions (externally). It’s not bounded by traditional enterprises constraints such as hiring freezes, assignment of office space, network and system configuration, and all the other processes that always seem to take months to implement.

Last week I wrote about a non-profit organization I did some content management work with, and what the employees chose to do when presented with two content management toolsets – SharePoint, and a file server. The file server was heavily adopted (or more correctly, continued to be used) while SharePoint usage tailed off. As soon as IT stopped their ongoing program of educating, cajoling and lambasting Sharepoint fell out of employees “field of view.”

Earlier in the year I was very generously given some time off by my former employer (Xerox) to help a non-profit establish a content management strategy (amongst other tasks). At the time I worked as product manager for Xerox’ DocuShare ECM software so there was an obvious temptation to recommend that product to them as the solution to their million-document strong “storage problem.” In the end I made the ethical recommendation based on their overall capabilities and technology direction and we implemented a two-tier strategy that was both elegant and, some might say, “retro.” We decided to keep the vast majority of their content exactly where it was, residing on networked file servers that everyone knew how to access and use. We did overlay a new content structure (you could call it a taxonomy, even) that more clearly mapped to their organization.

While looking for a short-term place to live I ran into Silvia, a very interesting Italian twenty-something and walking case study for our product (but she doesn’t know that yet, of course). Silvia is wrapping up her PHD at Stanford, while concurrently working for a start-up software company. AND pursuing her passion for travel. In-between listening to her sales pitch about why I should sublet her place while she roams around Europe and South East Asia I hit her up for some information on her working life. Besides the obvious question “Does she ever sleep?” I was really curious to know HOW she does it. Particularly, what are her work processes when she’s in the wilds of India with unpredictable communication capabilities, and work demands continue uninterrupted in Palo Alto. The good news (for my hypothesis at least) is she still depends to a large extent on local processing power to do her job.

In his 2001 book Free Agent Nation Daniel H. Pink quotes some ponderous statistics about the growing trend amongst American workers away from the “Company man/job for life” philosophy to one more in keeping with the values of the individual. Specifically he estimated there were over 33 million Americans working for themselves. He identified three categories of independent worker:

• Soloists (16.5 million) – professionals performing discrete contract work for others. Graphic designers, plumbers, computer programmers, house painters – you get the idea.
• Temps (3.5 million) – skilled individuals performing non-project work, typically in larger organizations.
• Microbusinesses (13 million) – individuals or small teams developing, selling and supporting goods in the marketplace. These businesses are frequently home-based.

Add it all up and you get 33 million people operating as free agents.