During lunch on Tuesday of this past week, ScottHa raised an interesting discussion point by saying that he rarely sees MVPs that are enterprisie ... by that, MVPs that actually work for (day to day) for an enterprise). Granted, he used to be one himself back when he worked for Corillian. But as we looked around the group you could see that we were all trying to recollect if we knew of any other MVPs that are enterprisie. Sadly, we didn't.
Now, the point of that discussion was not say that people in the enterprise cannot be MVPs, it is more to find out the reasons why there isn't a community of enterprisie developers. We started to talk about some reasons as why people wouldn't/couldn't be members of a community. Here's an example of these reasons:
- Not having too much free time -- people do have lives outside work
- Shutting off when the bell rings -- again, people do have lives outside work and IT
- Not caring -- people go to work to just collect a paycheck
- No valid channels to provide support/feedback -- do the forces behind the enterprise care about talking with other enterprises?
We explored some of these (and others) in somewhat detail to see if we could get a sense of the problem. Later that evening during our product dinner, I posed the same question to my members of our table to see if we could get a different perspective.
So now, I ask you, my three readers, are there channels or ways to reach to people in the enterprise? If so, is there a problem with providing greater reach? And if not, how can we create such channels?
If you work in the enterprise, I would love to hear your thoughts on this!