Enterprise 2.0 - "Evolution or Revolution"

I am deeply honored and excited to have recently joined TWIKI.NET as President and CEO.

TWiki is a platform that is well known in the circles I keep. When I was asked by their investors to take a look at the company, I was immediately interested in getting involved. This small team of dedicated and passionate folks have been under the radar from a commercial perspective despite a healthy monthly download metric in the open source project, great customer list, and a differentiated story.

I took the opportunity to jump into my new role by attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and start to get plugged in. Walking around Harvard and MIT with friends was an extra bonus.

It was a great conference with great speakers, workshops, and panelists. One session in particular stuck out, "Enterprise 2.0 - Reality Check", moderated by Matthew Fraser with Christian Finn (Microsoft), Nate Nash (Bearing Point), Neil Callahan (mktg), and Ross Mayfield (Socialtext). Christian kicked it up a notch when he stated that this movement from Enterprise 1.0 to 2.0 is more Evolution rather than Revolution.

Gasp!

Audience members murmur and tweet. One by one, the rest of the panelists politely but distinctly weaved in their disagreement with Christian on follow up questions. Granted Christian was taking a rather academic view that evolution happens through a series of small revolutions. The difference is a matter of perspective I suppose. However, the populist view was that we are here to revolutionize. People subscribed to the view that enterprises are changing the way they do business, and an evolutionary approach just doesn't cut it.

The point stuck in my head for the rest of the week. Reflecting back, for the last 7 years or so, my organizations have been users of TWiki across Yahoo, Motorola, and Devicescape. Having led teams representing multiple functions, based in multiple locations and timezones, and in all sizes, I feel we are in the very early stages of this transformation. A sentiment supported as I looked around the conference and talked to various vendors, potential customers, and industry observers. We don't have obvious ROI models, sourcing is grass roots, majority of the CEOs are either ambivalent or on the fence, IT managers are dubious, and finally we call it different things such as Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Networking, Collaborative Enterprise, among other tags. Its just the beginning. Hence the opportunity.

With over 60,000 installations across 130 countries, in all industries and verticals, TWiki appeals to our customers due to its extensibility, scalability, security, and open source model. What my teams appreciated about TWiki was the ability to build out customized workflow applications. More than that, TWiki is a platform on top of which you can write applications that automate workflow, or integrate various IT assets, in a highly customized way. The platform adapted to the enterprise and not the other way around. Today, we get energized every day to see that collaboration takes many forms. People, teams, organizations, companies, and even countries are collaborating with TWiki. We are very excited to be a part of it all.

The best endorsement comes from the community and not from anything I can gush about.

We have been nominated for the "Best Project for the Enterprise" in Sourceforge.net's 2009 Community Choice Awards.

You can see our nomination video here: http://tinyurl.com/n8edme and vote for us at: http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/vote/?f=426

We deeply appreciate taking your time to vote for us.

So is it Evolution or Revolution? What do you think?

Jeet

2009-07-06 | Jitendra Kavathekar | Category General