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May 28, 2003
Using Weblogs to Manage IT Organizations
I've been asked to moderate a panel on using weblogs in IT organizations at the upcoming Weblog Business Strategies conference in Boston (June 9-10). I've been mulling this topic over and trying to come up with questions and discussion topics for the panel members. Here's what I'm thinking so far.
I'd like each panelist to spend no more than five minutes introducing themselves and their organization. No slides necessary (or even wanted). This introduction should contain information about their experience blogging and why they blog. Here are a few questions to think about in preparation:
- When I took up blogging, I was looking for a way to connect with the people in the State of Utah IT organization which is large and scattered. What do you hope to accomplish within your organization with your blog? What positive and negative experiences have you had?
- Are you encouraging members of your organization to blog? How? How many bloggers are there in your organization?
- One of the chief uses of blogs in an IT organization is narrating your work. How valuable is it for you to narrate your work. How valuable is it for you to read what others are writing?
- One of the people who started blogging in Utah was a technical support technician in Richfield UT, about 100 mile from SLC. I read what he had to say frequently and became aware of part of the IT organization in Utah of which I'd previously had no visibility. How interested are you in reading what the "leaf nodes" in your organization say? Why?
- I know of one fellow in Utah who made a number of his coworkers angry at him when he wrote in his blog about a mistake he and others had made. In this and other ways, blogs can be threatening to large, risk-averse organizations. How do you cope with the "risk averse" nature of most large organizations?
- I know of one IT organization that uses a blog format for network outage notification (along with the accompanying RSS feed). What uses do you see for the blog format beyond an individual journal?
- Blogs are loosely coupled conversations. Can you point to examples in your organization where blogs have helped drive consensus on a controversial issue or where the conversation has led to a desired outcome?
- One of the things I've noticed is that blogging requires an abundance mentality. I've also noted that blogs encourage a culture of candor. How do you develop a culture that supports sharing? Are the cultural properties that support blogging the same ones that support building a first rate IT organization?
- An article in Information Week said "The last thing you want are uncontrolled and ever-expanding records of individual activities." Are you afraid of this record of individual activities? Is your General Counsel or HR department?
- Some organizations have published weblog guidelines. Do you have any? If not, why not? If so, what are they?
- How can weblogs be used to enhance corporate memory? Do you view blogs as a source of information about the past or a record of important decisions? What's missing in current tools? Are you doing anything to categorize or inventory blog content inside your organization?
- There are clearly a lot of people in the "I don't get it" camp with respect to blogs. How do you answer them? Is one of them your boss?
- Do you keep work blogs behind a firewall? Is there anything to be gained when employees know that their thoughts are for the consumption of their coworkers and not the world at large? What is lost?
That's all I can think of right now. If you have other topics that you think are germane and would like to see discussed, let me know. I'll put them on my list.
04:44 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Novell Challenges SCO
The SCO vs. Linux contest took on a soap opera-like quality today with Novell issuing a press release that challenges SCO's ownership of UNIX. In the words of Jack Messman, Novell's CEO:
[C]ontrary to SCO's assertions, SCO is not the owner of the UNIX copyrights. Not only would a quick check of U.S. Copyright Office records reveal this fact, but a review of the asset transfer agreement between Novell and SCO confirms it. To Novell's knowledge, the 1995 agreement governing SCO's purchase of UNIX from Novell does not convey to SCO the associated copyrights. We believe it unlikely that SCO can demonstrate that it has any ownership interest whatsoever in those copyrights. Apparently, you share this view, since over the last few months you have repeatedly asked Novell to transfer the copyrights to SCO, requests that Novell has rejected.
The tone of the letter (contained in the press release) has the feeling of a flame war on a newsgroup rather than a letter from one CEO to another.
01:53 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Watches and Computers
The other day as I was driving to an appointment I glanced at the clock in my truck to see how I was doing for time. For some reason it struck me that I can remember when the only clocks in cars were wrong. I don't wear a watch usually. I've found that clocks are ubiquitous. I'm almost never somewhere where I can't find a clock. No need really to carry one on my wrist. The reason that people carry watches harks back to a time when clocks were not easy to find and yet time was becoming more and more important. They needed portable time to work in the world in which they lived. I think the analogy to computing is interesting.
While I don't carry a watch, I do almost always have a computer with me of one sort or another. And a personal communications device called a cell phone. This is largely because I can't find these things conveniently (and certainly not with access to my information) as I move about. Perhaps as computers and connectivity become ubiquitous, we'll also find ourselves leaving our laptops at home and relying on the computing devices we find where we are. That's a twist from how I've imagined the future.