Wednesday, December 18, 2002

Lyle Kantrovich has an interesting blog post about Corporate Blogging.  I like the thoughts on blogging as reputation management and a means to identify subject matter experts within a company.  There's also a great article in this blog archive about why taxonomy is important.  It makes the case that company portals often include an enterprise taxonomy that is difficult to plan and implement. 8:43:00 PM    comment []

Here's a good interview with John Robb of Userland about what a k-log is.  K-logs sound like blogs used in a corporate setting to collect information. There's an interesting observation in the comments to this interview.  There's a programmer who's been doing what I do (keeping a Project Notes type file) for years. 8:04:34 PM    comment []

Blogging at Work:  You MUST Document EVERYTHING It's becoming aparent to me that formal project documentation and standard notes are not enough.  You must document conversations and thoughts.  I'm not even sure that is enough.  However, it's also aparent that blogging is a wonderful tool to do this. Blogging even random fragments could prove very useful because they are time stamped.  In addition, blogging makes this type of knowledge semi-public (perhaps only the project team instead of the public at large).  This should encourage "group think", and I believe may provide a way to capture individual's tacit knowledge of the project.  I need to read up on k-logs.  I would like to make a case to my company for blogging.  I am sure it's there, and it may have already been made. 7:55:50 PM    comment []

Blogging at Work:  Hallway Conversations Here's another way to use weblogging at work.  On every project I've been on, the project team has had "hallway" or informal conversations with the client where requirements were spelled out or clarified.  Sometimes, requirements are even added or removed from scope in an informal conversation.  Because these conversations are informal, they are rarely documented.  This creates a bad situation later in the project when questions come up about why things were done a certain way in the system the project team has built. Weblogging could solve this problem.  If members of the project team were disciplined in their use of weblogging to record these conversations, you would have them repository that was date and time stamped.  This would allow the team to quickly reproduce a record of when something about the project was changed. Why do I believe it would be easier to be disciplined about weblogging this information rather than keeping other types of notes?  I believe that if people get in the habit of journaling other types of information in their weblog, that the project information will naturally follow.  So, in other words, if people are disciplined about weblogging their work activities, it should be easy to be disciplined about blogging conversations. Also, blogs are easier to write because they are less formal.  However, they are more formal than many other types of notes, partly because of the author's realization that the blog is public - intended to be read by other people.  So, they force a more thorough communication than notes, and probably will provide a better record than the types of notes most people take. 5:42:18 PM    comment []

Pocket PC Kudo Here's something that I'm really enjoying about my new Pocket PC.  I am able to whip out my Pocket PC and portable keyboard during meetings and take meeting notes in Pocket Word.  Then, I go back to my desk and set my Pocket PC in its cradle and download the document.  I copy the document to my project folder and put some final editing touches on it in Word and send it out.  It's tre easy and it gives the project management types (better known as Word junkies) a nice, crunchy Word document to chew on.  Does this make me rethink doing all my documents in DocBook?  I don't know... 11:04:06 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Tom Pierce.