Tilting at Windmills 2.0
posted by Jeff Moriarty on June 11, 2007
I’ve been back from sabbatical for a few weeks now, and I’ve finally finished all my mental unpacking. I had two solid months of no meetings, no conference calls, no status reports, and no PowerPoint, so coming back was a bit jarring. Picture relaxing in a meadow full of flowers, sunlight on your face, birds singing… you recline on a hill watching the clouds go by, drifting off into a relaxing sleep. Then you are suddenly woken up by a grand piano falling onto your face.
Corporate culture… it’s madness.
Fortunately for me, my role has shifted a bit so I get to whack that beehive more “officially” than I did before. My title now is “Web 2.0 Design Engineer” in Intel IT. I hate the term “Web 2.0”, but it still seems to be the best shorthand for the group of tools, capabilities, and ideas I’ll be working on. Title aside, this will be fun.
My job is driving the adoption of blogs, wikis, forums, RSS, web apps, and community tools. It includes the full range of technical challenges (tool selection), political challenges (keeping it in budget), and social challenges (adapting it to Intel’s culture). I’m far from the only person at Intel pushing for these things, so right now I’m tracking down allies and trying to articulate a plan of attack.
To make it even more interesting, I’m going to post all of my windmill tilting in this blog. How does Web 2.0/social media fit into Intel’s model of “collaboration”? How do these tools improve productivity for a global company? How does it impact the culture of traditionally conservative Intel? This is different from the normal Intel method of sorting everything out internally, then publishing a white paper after the fact. We’ve made some great white papers this way, but it just doesn’t seem like the best way to crack this nut. Making the whole journey visible, the hits and the misses, the wins and the failures, will lead us to a much better solution. I’m envisioning part collaboration, part experimentation, and part soap opera.
To this end input is welcome, nay, highly desired. Does your company use internal or external blogs? Wikis? What has worked well, and what do you wish you could adopt but just won’t happen? What Web 2.0 windmills have you tilted at yourselves?
Comments (4)
tagged: blog, sabbatical, Web 2.0, wiki
Comments
Jun 12 | Luke Closs said:
Hello Jeff,
Our teams at Socialtext have started doing most of our agile project management using publicly readable wikis[1]. It’s great, because we get input from outside our team/company, and the cost of collaboration is extremely low. I’m working with some Japanese engineers from NEC on a project, and within one email cycle of introductions, we were already collaborating on the project estimates and planning.
My previous company was a bigger, conservative, VERY security conscious company with very strict, locked down security policies. It was difficult to collaborate with people inside the company in different departments, let alone even thinking about working with people outside the company. It’s so refreshing and amazing to me to have the cost of collaboration with engineers in another company be so cheap.
Our teams work together using voip/skype, irc, shared terminals using ssh/screen and of course, the wiki. Email is used for some discussion and for signaling people to look at the wiki.
While secrecy will always be important for certain subjects and projects, I think there is a lot of value in doing more work “in the open”. Enabling this is technologically easy - just setup a wiki outside the firewall. But it can be a scary step. Developers and project managers often don’t want to share schedules within the company, let alone to the world! :)
Regarding blogging, most of our staff blogs internally, and several of the developers blog externally. It can be hard to blog when you are just starting to create a community, because you’re not sure who’s reading.
Cheers, Luke
[1] - http://www.socialtext.net/stdev/?i18n_project
Jun 13 | Nathan Zeldes said:
We are all so used to hating the “Web 2.0” name, that it has become a standard disclaimer to say that we hate it. Maybe it’s time we invented another name - or simply accepted this one?…
Jun 13 | Heath said:
It’s good to have you back Jeff. I’ve been desperate for things to write about while you were gone, and now I can be inspired again :-).
Apr 17 | susan eustis said:
Ajax-styled architectures are the essence of flexibility. Web 2.0 is shifting as the contents of the feature pack are made more sophisticated. Architects are looking for both client-side and server-side solutions in the context of achieving SOA that is a dramatic shift in IT. Web 2.0 can be used to create Ajax-styled architectures that are affordable and bring more people into using the Intenet as a channel, dramatically shiting ease of use and ease of development.