Sunday, December 17, 2006
Why aren't folks from large enterprises blogging?
James Governor of Redmonk about a year ago pinged me regarding bringing transparency to large enterprises and their decision making processes. Over the last year I have attempted to encourage many of my peers to jump into the blogosphere and discuss their ideas, their strategies and their rants with some success but lately have came to the conclusion that I should back off as the blogosphere needs to learn to be friendly to enterprisey folks...
In thinking about the characteristics of most analyst firms and software vendors, by their very nature they are used to having short high-level conversations with lots of folks who constantly change while enterprisey folks tend to have longer conversations that span multiple dialogs with a more limited demographic.
This becomes problematic in that was is sometimes worthy of sharing by enterprisey folks may not necessarily fit into a concise single blog entry and require an ongoing conversation that crosses multiple discussion threads. What occurs in the blogosphere is that folks will jump into a conversation at any time by solely picking apart a perspective vs simply figuring out how to add constructively to it.
For example, James Robertson, Gary Short, David Heinemeier Hansson will go out of their way to amplify a statement taken out of context but when asked directly to participate in a dialog exercise their right to remain silent.
You will find that folks who work for large enterprises may be receptive to many of the ideas presented by those who don't work in our environment. We may be asking a question not to attack, but simply to understand all perspectives around an issue and to encourage healthy debate. Intuitively you may understand that we are bombarded with pontifications of productivity on an almost daily basis from software vendors and their suit and tie sales force and simply have tuned out to the message.
You can take an arrogant stance and simply ignore us by labelling us as enterprisey or you could do something more thoughtful by embracing us and more importantly the capital we can bring to the table. Keep in mind that the demographic you eschew happens to represent 90% of all IT people on the planet, so in not participating with us you are ignoring the masses.
As far as James Governor is concerned, I would suggest that if he truly desires for enterprises to become more transparent then the responsibility on him becomes to get his industry analyst peers to ask questions of us in the blogosphere for all to observe and not just rely on the notion of a phone-call based briefing...
| | View blog reactionsIn thinking about the characteristics of most analyst firms and software vendors, by their very nature they are used to having short high-level conversations with lots of folks who constantly change while enterprisey folks tend to have longer conversations that span multiple dialogs with a more limited demographic.
This becomes problematic in that was is sometimes worthy of sharing by enterprisey folks may not necessarily fit into a concise single blog entry and require an ongoing conversation that crosses multiple discussion threads. What occurs in the blogosphere is that folks will jump into a conversation at any time by solely picking apart a perspective vs simply figuring out how to add constructively to it.
For example, James Robertson, Gary Short, David Heinemeier Hansson will go out of their way to amplify a statement taken out of context but when asked directly to participate in a dialog exercise their right to remain silent.
You will find that folks who work for large enterprises may be receptive to many of the ideas presented by those who don't work in our environment. We may be asking a question not to attack, but simply to understand all perspectives around an issue and to encourage healthy debate. Intuitively you may understand that we are bombarded with pontifications of productivity on an almost daily basis from software vendors and their suit and tie sales force and simply have tuned out to the message.
You can take an arrogant stance and simply ignore us by labelling us as enterprisey or you could do something more thoughtful by embracing us and more importantly the capital we can bring to the table. Keep in mind that the demographic you eschew happens to represent 90% of all IT people on the planet, so in not participating with us you are ignoring the masses.
As far as James Governor is concerned, I would suggest that if he truly desires for enterprises to become more transparent then the responsibility on him becomes to get his industry analyst peers to ask questions of us in the blogosphere for all to observe and not just rely on the notion of a phone-call based briefing...
