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INTEGRATION WATCH: Blogs Providing Effective Team Integration
By Andrew Binstock
 July 15, 2004 — As more than one pundit has observed, the Web gives every idiot
a megaphone. If you consider the extremist screeds, bigoted claptrap and misbegotten nonsense posted on the Web, you undoubtedly suffer from the disquieting feeling that there are far more members of the flat-earth society than you ever believed. To this load of pabulum, we can certainly add blogs (or, if you prefer the formal term, Web logs), which in large part consist of self-indulgent narratives of trivial quotidian activities written by people with plenty of time on their hands.
Not all blogs fall to the level of the purely puerile, although many do. Programmers and technologists, for example, form a discernible group of bloggers who use the medium to communicate things of value to their peers.
In a move that appears to cut across traditional corporate culture, Microsoft has encouraged its developers to blog about what they’re working on (see msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/team/blogs, for one). These blogs are surprisingly candid and informative. Faults in Windows’ design as well as tips for getting around them are frequently posted. Outside of Microsoft, SD Times columnist Larry O’Brien has an interesting blog at www.knowing.net, and Miguel de Icaza’s log is a must-read for the .NET crowd. (A separate cabal of Java bloggers exists as well, although in my opinion, it’s somewhat smaller and less tightly dedicated to the technology.)
Programmers represent one of the most important and dynamic communities served by blogs, because programmers recognize the value of sharing their breakthroughs and typically don’t want to pollute their technical information with off-topic drivel. (Before I move on to my next point, I should point out that blogs of the Iraq war were particularly fascinating, especially during the early campaign, when you could read posts from people in Iraq as well as from soldiers closing in on them.)
To keep abreast of the blogs you care about, the RSS feed mechanism has emerged as the technology of choice. RSS, which has been an acronym for three different appellations, basically is an XML format that represents content from a blog (among other things). By use of RSS and an aggregator, blogs can be checked for new posts, which are then consolidated and presented to you. This summary saves your visiting each blog individually to see what has changed.
Now, take these two technologies—blogs and RSS—and think of how an IT site could use them internally. One clever way, which has begun to appear for system managers, is for sys admins to post what they’ve done during a given day, as well as the problems they encountered and the solutions they designed.
This blogging has several immediate benefits: A manager using RSS can find out what the staff is up to without having to wait for status meetings or for time sheets
to be filled out. For the admins themselves, it creates an unstructured but searchable knowledge base of system issues and fixes. It combines both the problem-solving and the system history into one document that is traceable back to the dates and the persons involved. What could be better?
Now consider applying this model to software development. By use of blogs posted on the IT department’s intranet, managers can measure progress on a project and developers can share the nuggets of wisdom that they’ve come up with. The latter is especially useful when it delves into problems that are likely to confront other members of the team—such as using the new features in Java 1.5 or C# 2.0. Knowledge of this kind, especially, should be shared and posted. In addition, because blogs provide means for posting comments, improvements to proposed workarounds can be contributed by readers, including peers and managers.
Much of development work today involves two types of activities: 1) announcing the work you’ve done for purposes of tracking progress and avoiding miscommunications and 2) logging what you’ve done as part of a historical record that can be reviewed by people who come after you. In the past, the latter step was frequently forgotten or the material was buried in untold comments in source code. Both activities are well served by the blogging metaphor, which also adds greater searchability and, of course, the RSS feed mechanism. Expect to see more blogs at your site—among developers, sys admins and system managers. Because business activities by other employees involve similar challenges and solutions, I expect that blogs will become a common staple of communications among your users as well. At which point, your department will start supporting blogs as well as using them internally.
Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works LLC.
Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works LLC
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