I was reflecting on some ideas I had during the recent Drupal BADCamp a couple of weeks ago. I sat in on @amazonk's talk on Drupal in the Enterprise. I've heard Kieran speak on this before and it sounds as if some real progress is being made in government and commercial entities. I've been following some of the developments in my field of higher education via the D.O. site.
The topic got me thinking about our experience last year in pitting Drupal agains an inexpensive proprietary CMS system which eventually won out as the "campus standard". In our case, proprietary software won out on the fact that it is used (and licensed) by other UC campuses, that there was a vendor to provide "support" and our total cost for licensing was pretty low.
The Drupal "Fit"
We did a count recently. By our estimates, we're running upwards of 300+ Drupal sites on our campus. The bulk of these sites are in the School of Engineering which has been nice enough to provide hosting services to many small units and projects. Larger sites that might qualify as "enterprise" include the School of Engineering, the University Library; the Arts Division and its affiliated sites; as well as some of my sites in Business and Administrative Services (campus emergency site, Fire Department, ADA, BAS division site, Campus Sustainability, etc.).
In thinking about where my Drupal strategy fits into the campus enterprise, I have to adhere to a few principles. As a senior IT director, I can't (shouldn't) duplicate services in Drupal that we offer centrally; that would set me up for being rogue. However, where the requirements of a site don't match the services we offer centrally, we have a potential fit for Drupal. Do I click the "create site" button in my Aegir manager on each request I get? No. In some cases, it makes sense to guide our units to the centrally provided CMS service.
In other cases, it makes sense to take very old static pages and get them into Drupal where the value is in the ability to edit and manage the pages until such time that the centrally provided service can take on the work; even if that means moving twice in a two year period. The benefit is two fold; one we provide added value to the unit; two, we force the unit into a campus standard template which helps in the overall movement towards a unified web presence.
Drupal and Productivity Apps
Here's another fit for Drupal. Productivity apps. We've all heard or said, "yup, there's a module for that". That tends to make my IT colleagues nervous. Not completely sure why. In part, I think they want to have a vendor to turn to or blame if something doesn't work. Perhaps it's too open... and they want more boundaries; who knows. Yet, there are modules and many of them fit the requirements closely enough that a business process can be adapted to the software. My strategy on getting Drupal in the Enterprise is at this level. Here's how I got started.
Events Manager. Every entity manages events. Depending on how complicated the requirements need to be, this is a great fit for Drupal. Go build a prototype on a laptop and show the unit director what can be done. Start small; think big in phases. Maybe there's a way in your organization to
Small team collaboration. Take a look at Open Atrium. Out of the box, it meets a lot of small team needs. Documentation has recently gotten a lot better. Examples of highly customized versions are available that can act as thought drivers for the leadership in your org; hopefully they are smart enough to listen to different opinions.
Real time information management. Again, the guys at Development Seed have come up with a tool to aggregate news and information into a tool that can be easily customized to meet many requirements.
Quizes, maps, SMS messaging. I've got some articles on this site providing more detail on each of these. I'm moving some hand coded PHP to the Quiz module. We've had very low income students come to school with only a phone. They can get access to computers but they're missing deadlines. We're going to send them SMS reminders to file their paperwork on time. We're doing a new, interactive campus map based in Drupal. The underlying technology is applicable to data visualization, so I'm looking at some research options as well. Oh yeah, I built an online grocery so students can buy a 50lb box of toast wheat soy yummies; it's an idea, but our Dining folks can use the prototype to figure out what they're real needs are going to be as they work with the app.
The Community
Interestingly enough, the IT and Marketing groups behind our main campus web presence are trying to figure out how to get this new, proprietary system into the hands of the hundreds who need to get their old sites into the new system. Because we're so strapped for cash, the only logical approach is to use the community approach; one which is exemplified by open source software projects such as Drupal. The notion of users supporting users is one option that our central web team needs to consider if they're to gain wide spread support for this new system since the Enterprise can't afford a full scale training and support model. Chalk up another fit for Drupal and open source efforts.
Conclusion
Drupal has a fit for the enterprise. It might be at the enterprise-wide CMS, it might be in a collection of small web apps that add value to one or more groups in the enterprise. Some folks won't be open to the idea until you can show them; and some folks need to hear the message 300+ times... or use a site that they don't know is powered by Drupal.