Plogs

May 15th, 2004

An interesting article in CIO Magazine entitled, “The Virtues of Chitchat”, by Michael Schrage, discusses the use of blogs within corporate IT departments, most notably with keeping everyone informed with ongoing projects. Schrage calls them project logs, or “plogs”. A few quotes:

“Curious, I pinged a few of those Fortune 500 friends. To my astonishment, I discovered that while internal IT blogs may not be commonplace, they’re not exactly rare. Though utterly unscientific, my informal queries found several major companies allowing blogs to coordinate and annotate project status information. At least one global IT consultancy has a rather witty blogger—I can’t find out if it’s approved or not—whose work is apparently required reading for his associates. The blog’s hotlinks to internal reports, presentations and client reviews are reportedly first-rate.”

“Why wouldn’t it make sense for an IT project manager to post a blog—or “plog” (project log)—to keep her team and its constituents up-to-date on project issues and concerns? Is it inherently inappropriate for an individual to post constructive observations about a project’s progress? IT organizations that can effectively use blogs as managerial tools (or communication resources) are probably development environments that take both people and their ideas seriously.”

“From a managerial perspective, I can hardly think of a better way to get new members of an IT team contextually grounded than to give them plogs to peruse, rather than make them read the outdated project sheets or suffer through a hasty luncheon debrief by the current project leadership. Of course, that’s contingent upon the quality of the plog—but then again, the utility of virtually all management tools ultimately depends on their quality.”

I am in the beginning stages of putting together a memorandum to the management in my firm about the benefits of weblogs and this article will fit right into the articles that I am collecting for it. In addition, I am hopefully going to start a weblog in my library so that we can always be in touch with one another on the various and numerous research projects that are currently being worked on. A “plog” is the perfect concept for this issue. (article link via Topix)

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