A few years back, I traveled to a small town in North Carolina. This town, a haven for indie artists and antique traders, retirees and young environmentalists, had eschewed the more common American symbols – the corporations, the big-box stores, the brands. In the main streets of the downtown area, you couldn’t find a single franchise. There was no Starbucks or MacDonalds, or even a Border’s or Best Buy.

This was a wonderful place, with friendly faces and a calm, peaceful atmosphere.

Not everyone wants to live there. Some people actually want to live in Los Angeles, with it’s sprawling highways and anonymous Hollywood executives commuting band and forth to the Valley.

Asheville, North Carolina creates hand-bound books and home-brewed coffee. Los Angeles makes movies and iPods. (Well, Cupertino makes iPods, let’s not dwell on that metaphor)

In the business world, we have small and medium companies, we have larger corporations, and then we have what everyone keeps calling “Enterprise”.

What, I keep asking myself, is this Enterprise thing?

It’s been dawning on me lately, that Enterprise are the equivalent of old world empires, or the Soviet Bloc; not in the conquer-the-world-and-destroy-all-your-enemies sense—though that too may happen in some cases—but rather in the managerial and organizational challenges that arise.

In trying to learn more about what Enterprise 2.0 really is, I’ve been pondering the adoption (or lack thereof) of Web 2.0 technologies and platforms within the Enterprise world.

Now, if you look at the typical small-to-medium businesses, companies and studios, the mom-and-pop shops of the internet, you’re often looking at a small team, a few dozen people at most, usually fewer. These company comprise one to three major teams, say R&D, Sales and Marketing, and Management. These teams are small, close-knit, and people within the entire company are familiar with each other.

It’s easyto get everyone on a new platform, especially if it’s open source, free, or relatively inexpensive. Marketing will just love the new version of Wordpress. R&D and the product manager, will quickly gobble up space on the new wiki, etc. And when I say easy, I mean really really hard. But it’s possible to get everyone involved, adoption costs are low,  and you can start to see results rather quickly.

Personally, coming from a more web-oriented world, I love using high contrast web applications with jQuery special effects written in size 14 friendly fonts. But they also require refreshing the browser when they get stuck every so often, they run in a browser  – or worse, an Adobe AIR environemnt — and when they’re down, they take your work with you. It’s just a tradeoff that isn’t always appropriate, and mission-critical systems cannot afford to be as unstable as Twitter was when it got started. In a company thousands of employees strong, a system’s downtime is really big money.

As you can see, Enterprise, as usual, has very very different considerations.

In researching Enterprise and E2.0, I came across a guest post from Miko Matsumura on ZDnet, that tries to define what Enterprise is, and this is where the comparison to the empires of hold comes through; part of the difficulties of globe-spanning companies, thousands of workers strong, is that they tend to fragment into sub communities, posessing their own subculture and languages.

These organizations can get so big, the accounting department is a completely separate country from the IT department. You need a travel visa and a personal escort to get you past the water cooler in the entrance, because you do not want to get lost in the Calculator Jungle.

In particular, when training users while implementing ActionBase, I always encountered resistance from users who were used to the way they did their work. They had their routine, they were familiar with their systems, which had finally, after the last “adoption”, settled into a steady state, stable and reliable, or at least they knew all the kinks and quirks. Bringing in a new system? And then multiply this by the number of departments in each division times the number of divisions in the company—and this happened equally with tech-savvy users as it did with the non-techies.

And that’s part of the issue with Enterprise. They are huge. They are internally diverse. They are conservative (Something I believe is true of Apple as it is of Shell). The EmpireEnterprise is dealing with growth issues in a saturated finite market, it’s dealing with questions of self-governance and oversight, while trying to keep track of its borders and what the foreign city-states (our mom-and-pop shops from the beginning of this post) are doing.

Matsumura’s post gave me a lot to think about, but I believe I am finally beginning to process this strange and mythical creature that is Enterprise. Perhaps, I begin to wonder, this will explain the problems I’ve been having identifying the “community” that surrounds it, the way I am able to find communities from fields I am more familiar with. But let’s save that for next time.