Haven't posted here in quite a while, so hello again to those who remember me. I just posted a piece on my team's blog at blog.trailmeme.com, looking at an issue that might be of interest to this audience:

Soldiers, Privateers, Mercenaries and Web Technology

One of the fun aspects of Web product development is that you get to think up usage scenarios, and interesting personas to go with them. A few months back, an old classmate, who now works for a big Wall Street firm, emailed asking if we had an enterprise version of trailmeme available. We don''t, and at that point we didn''t even have fully-thought-through ideas; we only had some poorly-defined conceptual vaporware for potential enterprise markets. But the email got me thinking, and a startling thought hit me: the old idea that you develop a Web 2.0 product for consumer/SMB users and harden/evolve it for enterprise users is changing very rapidly. This is because the enterprise itself is changing very rapidly, due to the emergence of three very different IT-user personas, who demand very different future enterprise IT strategies. The three user personas I''ve defined are soldier, privateer and mercenary. Depending on which one dominates the future of work, enterprise IT could evolve in three very different directions. Which means the enterprise design for products like trailmeme could evolve in radically different ways.

One of the more radical conclusions in the article is that perhaps there is no real need for a separate category called "Enterprise 2.0" software/IT, given the way the workforce (and as a result, the enterprise) are changing, with blurring boundaries and increasing numbers of people employed in non-traditional models.Read the full post at here