On blogging

There is SO much go­ing on that I should be blog­ging about: the No­vartis Data Fed­er­a­tion Ini­ti­at­ive, Nim­bus, Share­Point, where we’re go­ing with ar­chi­tec­ture in NITAS, RDS search, and many, many oth­ers.

An­noy­ingly, those sort of top­ics take me a long time to write ef­fect­ively about, and thanks to all these things go­ing on, I’m hav­ing trouble find­ing the time to do the writ­ing. I will get to them, but likely not this week.

That said, there is one thing I’ve been asked about sev­er­al times re­cently that I can cov­er fairly quickly, so I will: this blog.

I’ll do it in the form of an FAQ, which saves me from hav­ing to write well-for­mu­lated para­graphs.

Q: Why are you blog­ging?

To share in­form­a­tion and per­spect­ive. To pro­voke some thought. To get feed­back. To try to be trans­par­ent.

Also be­cause I be­lieve, we (No­vartis), would be bet­ter off if we had a lot more blog­ging go­ing on, so I’m try­ing to do it to set an ex­ample and to get a sense of the chal­lenges in build­ing that kind of world. It’s all part of the Sci­entif­ic Web thing I’ve men­tioned once or twice.

Q: What do you like about blogs?

Blogs aren’t ne­ces­sar­ily bet­ter than email, or news art­icles, or for­ums; they’re dif­fer­ent, with dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­ist­ics.

One of the best things about them is that they are per­sist­ent.

Email is tran­si­ent… it goes out, it’s read, it van­ishes in­to archives or get de­leted. Blogs stick around. You can point to them as ref­er­ence, you can find them in search en­gines, you can link to them. I’ve heard from sev­er­al new em­ploy­ees in NITAS who, after join­ing No­vartis, read my blog entries dat­ing from the past year. They now have a bet­ter idea of what’s been hap­pen­ing around here and who I am, even be­fore I’ve met them.

Q: Why aren’t you blog­ging more? How fre­quently do you up­date your blog?

I don’t do this more of­ten be­cause writ­ing these things takes time… it takes a par­tic­u­larly rare kind of time: time when I can fo­cus on some­thing and put a bit of cre­at­ive en­ergy in­to pulling my words to­geth­er. That sort of time is in­cred­ibly sparse right now, and much of that is go­ing in­to man­age­ment tasks that I can­not delay.

At one point I was shoot­ing for a weekly blog entry. I de­cided not to do that be­cause I found my tend­ency was to write some­thing to meet the weekly goal that turned out to be ir­rel­ev­ant. (“My top fa­vor­ite tunes this week.” “Lo­tus is REALLY driv­ing me nuts today.” “Ode to caf­feine.” “Things I hate about travel.” etc.) So now I write these when I’m able to find time, which isn’t fre­quent enough.

Q: Are these blogs of­fi­cial?

Yes.

(Hon­estly - everything I do for No­vartis is be­ing done by me, which makes it of­fi­cially by me, right? If not, could you please let me know how I can tem­por­ar­ily sus­pend au­thor­ity?)

Q: What does of­fi­cial mean?

Here’s what I think that ques­tion is about, and is what I mean by of­fi­cial: I am us­ing the blog as one of the ways to make an­nounce­ments and to com­mu­nic­ate. I mean what I say in these things. An­nounce­ments of things like the DLI are ser­i­ous.

I also mean what I say in email, but a lot more people see it here than in most email, so there’s that much more pres­sure to get it right and stick to it. I think that pres­sure is im­port­ant.

I real­ize that Share­Point blogs can be ed­ited after the fact, but I treat blogs as part of the re­cord. Once it’s pos­ted, it’s up, mod­ulo fixes such as de-ty­po­ing, adding links, etc.

Q: When will you send email, and when will you blog?

We’ll have to see how this evolves. At present, if it’s time-sens­it­ive or if the com­mu­nic­a­tion is only of in­terest to a lim­ited group (e.g. NITAS), I’ll send email.

If it’s some­thing that should be per­sist­ent or may be of in­terest to oth­er people, or if I’m in­ter­ested in com­ments, then I’ll put it on the blog. And, per re­quest, if that blog post is par­tic­u­larly im­port­ant to NITAS per­son­nel, then Car­ol or I will send out an email note with a point­er to the blog.

Q: Do I think oth­ers should blog?

Yes. And some are. Yay!

I’ve no­ticed Joe Jiminez is blog­ging reg­u­larly and be­ing quite pub­lic about it. I think that’s fant­ast­ic.

But I’d love to read more from as­so­ci­ates at all levels - pro­ject man­agers, de­velopers, ana­lysts, unit heads, and many oth­ers.

Q: Why don’t we have bet­ter blog­ging tools in place?

Yeah.. I find the de­fault Share­Point blog­ging tool to be very an­noy­ing. I’ve got a long list of things I’d love to see changed. I toyed with us­ing Com­munity Serv­er but ran in­to some is­sues with that as well, some of which I think are now fixed.

But we have SO much to fix in the web and In­tranet space that I de­cided not to push it at the time. It wasn’t a pri­or­ity. Bring­ing up an­oth­er serv­er (e.g. Word­Press or Mov­able Type) would have been cool but would have ad­ded to the chaos.

So I’ve just grit­ted my teeth and pos­ted in­to the little text­box that Share­Point provides.

Now that Share­Point is tak­ing off and we’re look­ing at some ma­jor im­prove­ments in the com­ing months, I do ex­pect blog­ging tools to get bet­ter, and to de­vel­op a more co­her­ent blog­ging ap­proach in NIBR that oth­ers can take ad­vant­age of. There’s not a con­crete plan yet, but I ex­pect there will be with­in the next 2-3 months.

If we get that right, it will in­clude an RSS read­er strategy that will help people keep track of blogs easi­er than by check­ing them manu­ally. (People can do this now if they know how, but this will im­prove for every­one in the next year with Out­look and a few oth­er things in play.)