Feb 21, 2007 | blog
Ever had to write documentation for projects at work? The process can be tedious and fun at the same time. At least it is for me most of the time as the creative process lets you explore the best way to communicate a topic.
At the same time, its only as interesting as a person makes it, and the longer it takes the more boring it can become. That’s were I’m at getting the final tweaks finished on my latest document on mobile device configuration for one of our shipping departments.
The nifty parts of technical writing can be finally getting some standardization into the documents. You would be surprised at the differing levels of sophistication in the use of Microsoft Word! Some people still try to use spaces and tabs to fill empty space in their documents and forms! Ugh!
There are so many great features in Word that allow for the formatting that a person wants if they simply use the search feature in Help. Seriously, the help files have all the steps on using these features, and few people actually look it up. Instead they just hack it together and give up when it doesn’t work like they want it to.
So I’ve cleaned up several documents and forms for our Project Methodology, getting some standard formatting and features like file paths & versioning set up properly. Oh, well. On to more documentation!
Apr 18, 2006 | blog
You know, I never intended to have more than a follow-up to this topic (How can I encourage corporate blogging? on my old blog, and Corporate Blogging – Part II), but it has become a topic of interest to me. There are times at work when I believe that new ideas are simply “lost in the fog” so to speak. There were a couple of good posts on the topic of risk aversion several weeks ago by Robert Scoble and Kathy Sierra, in both corporate environments and personal lives.
Many times new ideas and technologies get brushed or set aside for reasons other than the obvious. By obvious, I mean something that does not fit the company’s goals, budget, or needs. To be more clear, people are afraid of change. They get too comfortable, too ‘clingy’ to their way of doing things – that’s corporate mentality as well as personal mentality. Last week I was surprised to find an openness to the idea of blogging one of our Disaster Recovery exercises. Not only on my personal blog (which I struggled with), but also as an exercise in communication during the test itself.
Now that does not come along too often, where a virtually unknown, untested technology or idea is embraced without any upfront research and fact-finding. For a corporate IT geek like me, that simply stunned me, right down to my shoes. It was quite an exciting way to start the exercise to begin with, and more so to see many team members utilizing the tool, updating with content, status, news, successes, issues, etc… What I’m really interested in at this point is what the feedback on the idea will be at our post-test meeting next week. Simply getting feedback about how to do it better next time will be the reward I’m looking for, because a simple, free, easy-to-access blog is a great method of communicating information during an event like the one we tested for.
But what about day to day? Not every day is a disaster (thank God), and not everything is critical information that needs instant dissemination. However, the need for simple many-to-many information publication is needed nearly everywhere in a corporate environment. The idea of departments being able to provide information to each other in a more casual way can, in many instances, allow more detail to be incorporated, and more thought in the structure of what needs to be said.
One important lesson that nearly everyone in corporate America has learned, is that mass-mailed email is read by almost no one. We all find them irritating and unnecessary; often they have more in common with Junk Mail than anything useful. And that’s a sad thing – we all have important jobs, and work hard to communicate information to each other. And what is always the number one complaint? That none of us communicate as well as we could.
This is where corporate blogging could really shine. Every department should have a main blog, and probably many personal blogs under it, or that contribute to it. Similar to going to ZDNet or CNet and sorting through dozens of RSS feeds for news on this or that, each department should publish its own unique information. There is always someone in each group, team or department that can or would take an interest in writing up the status of the day and publishing it for the rest of the corporation. Blogs also bring a solution to the problem of corporate Junk Mail. Because you can peruse the information at your leisure, it no longer has to interrupt your work – you can plan to read the information when you are receptive to it: morning, lunch, breaks, whatever. That also means that when a mass email is sent, it would actually have meaning, and would be important enough to stop what you’re working on and read it.
So in the end, blogging in a corporate environment can provide a much more dynamic and streamlined method of publishing information to the users of that information. Keeping email for person-to-person communications, where you can be more specific in the communication. It also seperates out another communication tool that many in IT fear – Instant Messaging.
Technorati tags: corporate-blogging, instant-messaging
Mar 27, 2006 | blog
While the concept is encouraging, I think that some companies (including the one I work for) don’t really ‘get’ blogging. There has been some talk, and the only place I’ve heard it from is the corporate officer level. This worries me because I don’t believe that the right people are thinking about blogging, or that they are thinking about it for the right reason.
What may be a powerful means of communicating with customers, or even simply within the company, is getting lost in a typical discussion of what tool to use. The fact that SharePoint was looked at along with wiki software tells me that the people looking for the blogging solution at our company, don’t even know why they should blog. SharePoint is a powerful tool and one can add a blogging component to it, but at its heart SharePoint is a collaboration tool.
It’s similar to what we did several years ago with SourceSafe. We had (actually still have) a need for a document management system. Somehow, someone got the ‘great’ idea to use SourceSafe. SourceSafe itself is a good product… for source code management. How the fact that it was a source code management system and not a document management tool got lost on everyone with decision-making power. What did we use SourceSafe for? Managing Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents, CD ISO images (please stop laughing, yes really), and many other items that should never be stored in a flat-file database (and these were ‘IT’ people who decided this!) Now I’ll be the first to rave about the wonders of SharePoint, and for a number of reasons, but blogging will not be among them – at all. Luckily it didn’t make it too far in the evaluation, and I’m not sure what software has made it any farther as the criteria for a corporate blogging solution is being tightly held.
What use is even considering a corporate blogging solution when the people evaluating the concepts don’t even understand what a blog is for? This is what concerns me about corporate blogging – that it gets tied up with the wrong people. And that the whole idea of blogging is for the wrong reason. I’ve got a suspicion that most companies that either have or are considering corporate blogging have the wrong idea about it, and have the wrong people investigating it.
Technorati tags: Corporate Blogging
Jan 26, 2006 | blog
I was quite surprised today when an IT Mgmt staff member asked a few of us about blogging! This is really interesting, as there are many reasons for our company to set up both an external blogging presence, and an internal one as well. There are many simple Mgmt –> employee communications that could be done through a short blog post. There are many things employees can communicate to each other and different departments instead of mass emails that many don’t read. Notifications from HR or IT could be done in this fasion as well for non-critical items. Blogging in general is simply one more way for people and companies to communicate. With the use of XML feed technologies such as RSS and ATOM, any user can have a constant stream of news being fed to their computer so they don’t have to go surf the ‘Net for it.
Can’t wait to see if anything comes of this – its an interesting year at my company, lots of opportunity for new things.
