The people enterprise

In recent years it has been popular to claim that there is a fundamental difference between online consumer applications and applications deployed in the enterprise. The former was all fun and games, the latter a real serious deal.

Entreprise may indeed be serious and for very good reasons. But the consumer mentality is entering the enterprise in a big way. And this is going to force enterprises to open up their processes.

The whole drive behind this is that consumers are taking their private consumer habits with them to work, as the adoption of addictive consumer services like social networking sites, search engines, blogging etc becomes more widespread.

Workers simply don’t understand that when they come to work they are bombarded back in time and kept from doing the things they would normally do. It runs the risk of becoming a barrier towards people wanting to be employed in your company.

This is not saying that you should allow your employees to spend days and days on Facebook though. This is just to say that people will expect the came kind of compelling user experiences and value propositions from enterprise applications as they have become accustomed to in their personal lives.

My bet is that increasingly this will become a fight you as an enterprise owner can’t win. So better look for ways of adapting to it. Change your attitude. Loosen up. Work with this, not against it - it pays. The consumer enterprise is coming.