I had a one on one meeting with my boss' boss' boss today. In the organizational chart he is a direct report to the CIO. He was meeting with everyone reporting to our director to assess the state of our transition after a merger.
As a disclaimer, this is a 55k employee, $11 bil. company.
He said he wanted to organize "communities of practice" (in other words: "networks of experts") so that people interested and expert in various IT subjects could collaborate. So, for example, there would be a .NET community of practice - a venue, for example, for questions, answers, ideas and experiences to be shared across a globally and organizationally distributed set of company .NET developers.
This was taking some time - his directs are wanting plans, structure, resources and causing delays.
I'm definitely not at the level my boss (3rd removed) is at, nor do I have anything approaching his experience in business or IT, but this struck me as super strange.
We spend millions of dollars on servers, client software and email servers to facilitate these discussions. I told him he could do it in 5 minutes. Send an email to the helpdesk requesting that an email distribution list be created, all the developers subscribed to the list. Then send a note to the list asking everyone to send an introductory email. If the list gets busy and starts asking questions and sending interesting things, problem solved, task accomplished. If they don't, then you don't need the community of practice to begin with. If the list needs to share code snippets or something then they'll find a service or make one.
I'm sure there's more to this than what I understand, but I can't help but wonder if sometimes we think an entire culture needs to change when all it really needs is an email to the helpdesk.
3 Responses
Catto
12|Jul|2008 1Hey Now Matt,
Good Post.
Thx 4 the info,
Catto
tc
31|Jul|2008 2Can't actually agree with you.
E-mail is just a flat and unstructured solution which would not work for large distributed company.
Can you imagine going through say i.e. 300 emails every day?
I suppose a forum with RSS would be much better. Less disk space used, central and much easier to skip on things you're not interested in or not conrening you.
But going further if you add knowledge base to it and indexing for speed it gets more efficient and interresting.
Probably a well balanced combination of somewhat integrated e-mail, im, forum and kb would do the right job
I'm guessing that the main factor for your boss'…. boss is knowledge flow so there are 2 things accomplished quick employee improvement and quick problem solving.
In a perfect world you (I mean the whole community) would create one big brain
Matt
31|Jul|2008 3I see your point. Email doesn't scale. (and yes, I can imagine going through 300 emails every day because I approach that)
But that's not the point of my post. The point is that IT is in the way. If a simple mechanism is not being used efficiently and a community wants to embrace features (threaded discussion, RSS, etc) that come with more complexity, they should have the tools to do so. IT's job, in fact, is to get out of the way so that users can use. Why should home internet users have better IT services than corporate internet users?
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