Monday, April 10, 2006
Does blogging increase the productivity of enterprise architecture?
As many people are aware, I currently hold the record in the blogosphere for being the only person that is employed by a Fortune 100 enterprise whose primary business model isn't technology that has blogged every single day for over eight months! Writing a well crafted blog entry takes time and throughout this journey some have been of high quality and some have been of very low quality. This is mainly due to the setting in which I happen to be conducting mental exercises and the state of mind in which it puts me in.
My day starts early and ends pretty late and throughout it I tend to play many different roles. It is difficult to switch into being a writer on a dime. Context switching as we know requires masterful algorithms in terms of scheduling and not dropping the thread of execution.
I have started to look for ways to increase my blogging when I have a few minutes of downtime. You can usually find little pieces of paper in my pocket with all of the wonderful thoughts that I love to share. I have been noodling whether blogging is just a continuim in which I have been to date savage about separating it from the thoughts I have at work and whether this is evil and even possible. I have been thinking that it may be better as a strategy to not think of technology (or the human aspects) I think about at home as being different than technology I think about at work.
I sometimes wonder whether bloggers in the blogosphere have figured out something that can make enterprise architecture better? The vast majority of blogs in the blogosphere are unpolished. Some are very rough and crude in their approach to delivering information. When reading blogs, folks understand that it is OK to be rough and therefore folks focus on content over presentation. Why can't folks in corporate America do the same? I bet if they did, productivity would increase by leaps and bounds...
What would happen in corporate America if enterprise architects didn't create "reference architectures" as tomes of wisdom that told those lowly developers (NOTE: I don't really believe this) how to code, what to code and so on. What if we eliminated Powerpoint as a tool for communication? The notion of creating "reference architectures" in corporate America is starting to gain popularity but no one has ever asked the question, why can't reference architectures exist in blogs instead of Word documents?
With many enterprises focusing in on Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA and other legislative and regulatory undertakings it seems to me that the current focus is increasing transparency at the expense of productivity. This has resulted in many enterprise architects talking about CMM, Six Sigma and ERP4IT. The funny thing is that there is currently nothing more transparent than a blog! Blogging is not only transparent but highly productive as a means to communicate. It takes me about twenty minutes every morning to create my blog which gets consumed by thousands of people on a daily basis, yet an idea that I wanted to share with say ten people would take me several weeks.
Have to think a little more on how we can get others in corporate America to participate in blogging. The act of demonstrating both productivity and transparency within the same action is liberating...
| | View blog reactionsMy day starts early and ends pretty late and throughout it I tend to play many different roles. It is difficult to switch into being a writer on a dime. Context switching as we know requires masterful algorithms in terms of scheduling and not dropping the thread of execution.
I have started to look for ways to increase my blogging when I have a few minutes of downtime. You can usually find little pieces of paper in my pocket with all of the wonderful thoughts that I love to share. I have been noodling whether blogging is just a continuim in which I have been to date savage about separating it from the thoughts I have at work and whether this is evil and even possible. I have been thinking that it may be better as a strategy to not think of technology (or the human aspects) I think about at home as being different than technology I think about at work.
I sometimes wonder whether bloggers in the blogosphere have figured out something that can make enterprise architecture better? The vast majority of blogs in the blogosphere are unpolished. Some are very rough and crude in their approach to delivering information. When reading blogs, folks understand that it is OK to be rough and therefore folks focus on content over presentation. Why can't folks in corporate America do the same? I bet if they did, productivity would increase by leaps and bounds...
What would happen in corporate America if enterprise architects didn't create "reference architectures" as tomes of wisdom that told those lowly developers (NOTE: I don't really believe this) how to code, what to code and so on. What if we eliminated Powerpoint as a tool for communication? The notion of creating "reference architectures" in corporate America is starting to gain popularity but no one has ever asked the question, why can't reference architectures exist in blogs instead of Word documents?
With many enterprises focusing in on Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA and other legislative and regulatory undertakings it seems to me that the current focus is increasing transparency at the expense of productivity. This has resulted in many enterprise architects talking about CMM, Six Sigma and ERP4IT. The funny thing is that there is currently nothing more transparent than a blog! Blogging is not only transparent but highly productive as a means to communicate. It takes me about twenty minutes every morning to create my blog which gets consumed by thousands of people on a daily basis, yet an idea that I wanted to share with say ten people would take me several weeks.
Have to think a little more on how we can get others in corporate America to participate in blogging. The act of demonstrating both productivity and transparency within the same action is liberating...
