I have written about QuickBase on this blog before, including their success with helping to transform employee behavior at XM Radio through enterprise 2.0. Now, they are more formally going after cross-enterprise adoption with a new set of initiatives announced recently that focus on large company deployments. This effort is aimed at “striking a balance between the needs of both business users and senior management when utilizing online business applications.”

I spoke recently with Josh Holbrook, program manager of enterprise research at Yankee Group, about the QuickBase move and gaining adoption for enterprise 2.0 tools in general. Josh said that there is a built-in potential conflict between IT and its desire for command and control and business users and their desire for flexibility to need specific business needs. So the business guys have often resorted to workarounds that only makes IT more interested in control. QuickBase is trying to bring these two groups together. It is providing a flexible business tool that gives IT some measure of control and the ability to look good in the eyes of their business users. Because QuickBase is an open-ended tool that can serve a variety of users for project teams, as well as cross enterprise applications, it can offer the flexibility that makes this IT/business user collaboration easier to pull off.

To provide a better tool that makes IT feel easy about adoption, QuickBase talked with many CIOs to understand their concerns. The QuickBase Enterprise Edition comes with an Administration Operation Center that provides a central location to get instant visibility into QuickBase usage within the company. Now senior management and IT can easily keep track of all traffic accessing applications and identify potential security risks by knowing who is accessing confidential company information inside and outside the company. They can also see who is doing innovation work and performing beyond expectations. This type of transparency operates best in the culture of trust that most successful companies should have anyway.

There are other features aimed at enterprise use:
Centralized Policy and Administration screens enable corporate passwords and security policies.
LDAP Integration allows IT to integrate QuickBase with existing corporate directory sign in and access rules.
IP Address Filtering helps enforce corporate data security policy, allowing only authorized internal users to access QuickBase when they are on the intranet or connected by VPN.
Centralized User Management helps central teams easily manage application access across large numbers of users.

Many enterprise 2.0 tools enter the organization through business teams and individuals. They will have to make peace with IT to create a win-win situation. IT, in turn, will have be flexible and recognize the business needs of their users and the wave of enterprise 2.0 to gain their half of the win-win. QuickBase has its own blog to provide more details on their moves and thoughts on the market, in general.