In a meeting at work today, there was a discussion about the use of Drupal in enterprise environments. This was triggered by Josh Koenig's posting on the subject yesterday. It is worth the read. It also got me thinking.

It seems that there is little or no awareness of Drupal in the mind set of Fortune 500 companies. I am guessing that when leadership in these companies wants a Web site overhaul, they have a sense of what they want it to do and pass it off to consultants to figure it out.

First, most companies are dominated by Microsoft in every aspect of daily efforts ranging from Exchange servers, to SQL databases, to the Office suite. As such, most bricks and mortar consultancies come from the Microsoft world. There are very few bricks and mortar Drupal houses.

Just a few weeks ago there was a Microsoft "Partners" meeting in Denver. The downtown literally doubled for a few days. So, the natural consultants to go to are well versed in Microsoft.

Second, most companies in the Fortune 500 group are very conservative. They have needed to be to maintain the status of being Fortune 500. Drupal is a disruptive technology--not something that established companies tend to embrace.

How does one do business with companies in this tier if one is an opensource community? I don't really know the answer to that question. However, strangely enough, I believe some of the lessons are being taught, learned, and experienced by the arts and cultural nonprofit sectors. I recently ran a four hour Web 2.0 seminar for the Association of American Cultures and worked with 40 or so people from the arts and cultural nonprofit sectors. Web 2.0 is a philosophy they MUST figure it out as participation in the traditional arts has been dropping like a stone. What is my mantra to these groups?

MEET THEM WHERE THEY GATHER

If you want to build audience go to the blogs they frequent and post, go to the forums they enjoy and participate, enter SecondLife and interact, and find them on Facebook. In short, listen to what they are interested in and let them know you care. They will meet you half way.

The lesson needs to be interpreted a bit differently for big business. One of the challenges for the Drupal community is representing the needs of big companies in terms they will understand. For example, if I were to say to somebody not in the know,

"Well you can manage to separate your groups and make them private by using og. Then if you want to track what changes that they make to their accounts you can approach accounts as nodes and use diff." and so forth.

Watch the face glaze over. og? nodes? diff? I would have glazed over a year ago.

We need to speak to the prospective company in terms they understand. We need to demonstrate that we will meet them where they gather (so to speak) in understanding needs and providing solutions for those needs in ways they get. In short, sometimes, we need to focus on the vision of the site and not on the tool.

In many ways the arts and cultural sectors and the Drupal community are alike. Both are very geeky in their own way and both are trying to find ways to reach out to those outside their normal domain.

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