Robert on Software Development

Effective communication tools

I’ll admit it: I was a bit late to the Twitter game. I remember when it launched, but I honestly couldn’t find a value for it beyond the novelty. Over the past year, Twitter has become very popular with all kinds of people, evolving into a communications medium through which entire conversations about all kinds of topics occur. I decided to give Twitter a second look.

I was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Twitter posts, or tweets, from the people I was following. I eventually had to pare down the list of people I followed to a select few, just so I’d be able to keep up. With all the things I’m working on, I don’t really have the time to read 500 tweets per day.

Yesterday I came across a blog post from Rick Strahl entitled Twitter this, Twitter that. Around the same time, I was thinking of a post for this blog about how to manage communications across large and disparate teams. The confluence of my plans, his post, and my own Twitter experience was too perfect.

In my current role, I’m in charge of the technical review board, which means every change request comes across my desk for technical evaluation and approval. In the process of dealing with these requests, I work with the change builder, the other folks in the PMO, my customer, and my customer’s customer. That’s a lot of communication on a daily basis. Fortunately I have a workflow in place for the technical review board meeting (that’s a future post), but the communications with stakeholders and change builders is not built into that workflow. I have to manage it all myself, including phone calls and emails.

A tool like Twitter, deployed within the enterprise and properly used and managed, would simplify this type of communication and fit nicely into a workflow. Imagine a Twitter feed that contained updates about the lifecycle of a change request, or specific activities in a workflow, or status of a meeting as it occurs. Long emails that get lost in the shuffle would be traded in for 160 character posts that get the information across very succinctly.

There is a plethora of enterprise communications tools, like Groove, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, and so on, but they are all large installations with a lot of overhead. Twitter is lean, easy to use, fast, and fun. These are factors in Twitter’s success. In fact, the sheer success of Web 2.0 as a whole is partly hinged on the simplicity of the tools involved (compare Google.com to Yahoo.com). And gaining adoption of a tool like Twitter in the enterprise would depend on these factors as well: how much of an impact it will have out of the box.

The larger question is, how do you get Twitter functionality in the enterprise without using the public service? Well, the point isn’t using Twitter itself, but rather gaining the rapid communications that the service provides. That will be up to the software vendors.

We’ll see how this plays out over the next six to nine months.