Enterprise 2.0 Octopus? Perhaps…
Sam Lawrence over at Jive Software is a lucky man. He lives spot on in the center of the “enterprise 2.0/web 2.0″ universe. So he dreams. And wishes. And imagines…
“Whenever I talk about the new enterprise collaboration I always imagine an octopus. The big head of the octopus is where we gather….”
He says the arms exist to grab information that we need to do our jobs. But in the current enterprise, there is no head.
“The problem is, there’s no central place for the people. All we have are file generating machines. Email machines. Calendar machines. Word processing, spreadsheet and presentation machines. And many companies purchased even bigger, complex machines to manage the output of all those other machines. In the meantime, we just work around those machines and wonder, “which way to the head?”
Now I’ve never been a fan of octopi in reality, but the picture he paints is pretty fun. And the idea of people in enterprise 2.0 organizations living in the head of an octopus while arms do the heavy lifting for us is fitting.
Of Heads, Hearts and Arms
I’ve been thinking about enterprise 2.0 in a slightly different way when it comes to collaborating with customers, prospects and others in the ecosystem (the sea we float in… as it were). I’m convinced - at least where the corporation meets their constituency online - that:
- Traditional web sites represent the head of an organization - carefully planned and crafted messages set out for knowledge gathering and lead generation activities.
- New collaborative areas of a site (business blogs, etc.) represent the heart of an organization - where we get glimpses of what people inside are passionate about, can engage in conversation and understand the values of the people within.
And the arms? I’m completely aligned in analogy with Sam there - the arms reach out to get / or give information on-demand.
In enterprise 2.0 they do it via intelligent, managed RSS feeds - delivering the right information to the right people at the right time; and in knowledgebases that link the different “complex machines” (CRM, ERP, CMS, name another TLA) that support the business together.
Our buddies at Attensa provide the arms into- and out of- the enterprise 2.0 octopus to me - for those who want to get inside the heads and hearts of those who live there, as Sam imagines…
“Sometimes it’s a team, sometimes it’s the whole company, but all of us are in the head of the octopus. It’s where we live. It’s where we get unify and freely interact. What’s great about being in the head, is you get to leave all your stuff behind and just get to the point“
And in a world where getting to the point is a rare experience, let me find and deliver that experience for customers any way I can…
