The Enterprise IT Revolution: The Hype of the Enterprise is Gone

The Enterprise is dead.  Long live the Enterprise!

While enterprises haven’t gone away,  the term Enterprise seems to be on the way out.  At least it has  lost its trendiness.  If  Gartner were to plot a hype chart for Enterprise Software, we might have seen that it peaked somewhere around the year 2000.   We don’t have a Gartner hype graph to refer back to 2000, but we can see from Google search frequency chart that “enterprise software” is dropping in terms of the frequency of searches.  (But even Google goes only back to 2004)

The term Enterprise Content Management (ECM) was coined by AIIM in 2000.  But the world of ECM has been a moving target ever since.  Nearly every year since 2005 AIIM has had to revise the definition of what ECM is.  Now ten years later, there are a number of serious discussions that are suggesting that a new term for ECM be adopted that does away with the word Enterprise to become more relevant.  I thought of these discussions when I came across a recent article in Forbes describing EMM, Enterprise Marketing Management, and how the name is no longer appropriate.

Maybe blame it on ERP, but the Forbes article points out that the word Enterprise has taken on a bad meaning.  The article quotes Gartner as saying that “the word ‘enterprise’ often has the negative connotation of large-company, big-project initiatives with high costs and a low return on marketing investment (ROMI).”  Today Social Media and Collaboration are expanding the boundaries of organizations to include suppliers, customers and partners.  It’s now more than just the enterprise.

Lisa Arthur in the Forbes article recommends instead of Enterprise to use Integrated.  So instead of Enterprise Marketing Management, use Integrated Marketing Management.  The idea is that we want to break down the barriers and silos that can isolate and separate both people and  information, and that Integrated can convey that idea.  So, in the case of Marketing, it would be Integrated Marketing Management (IMM).  And if it made sense in the world of content, possibly Integrated Content Management (ICM).

While I agree that the term Enterprise is perhaps ready for retirement,  Integrated doesn’t seem like the right replacement, but we’ll have to wait and see what takes hold.