I suppose, like many companies, we’re trying to stay under the radar from the roving hammers of economic suckdom.  I also think we’re doing pretty well at it.  Possibly like other companies, we are taking the opportunity to completely rethink a core business need: communication.

I am confident that anyone who spends a decent time with an employer eventually will say “communication in our company isn’t that great.”  It’s probably inevitable that as a company grows, the individual teams focus harder on what they are good at, maybe because of time constraints, maybe corporate culture turning introverted, maybe something else.  Anyway, it happens to the best.

It’s also something I have a decent interest in.  I enjoy sharing knowledge and information and sometimes have felt frustrated that there wasn’t a decent outlet for me to do so.  Well, like they say, be careful what you wish for.  Seemingly overnight our company has embraced three new initiatives that will hopefully foster communication.

The first one is an installation of Microsoft Office Communication Server.  That’s a big name for a little service: IM.  Well, MOCS (ahhh… acronyms) does a lot more than just Instant Messaging, we’re using video conferencing and other Live Meeting functions too. But the one that I cared about was IM.  Email is just so heavy to ask a simple question or send a code sample.

MOCS was decided upon after trying out three different video conferencing systems.  This was decided within about a week.  So within two weeks, we had a new communication and conferencing solution.

Back to the original point, the next thing we adopted was a centralized bug tracking system, BugTracker.NET.  This was a surprise to me, because I downloaded it as a simple replacement to my spiral-bound notebook.  I’ve been writing things down for years now and have recently learned that it doesn’t help me at all once I turn the page.  Going back a year in my notes, I logged 60 open issues into BugTracker.

I explained to my boss what I was doing, he spent about 30 minutes with it and said that this was the new standard for the department.  So, within a day, we had a new issue tracking system for hardware and software issues.

Thirdly, during a brainstorm session on how our department can be more friendly to our customers, the end users, it was suggested we maintain blogs.  This was pretty exciting to me because it opened the door to things I really wanted, like support forums and wiki knowledge bases.  But blogging is a start.

I was given the lead for it and selected Community Server since I had experience in maintaining one and using one (here!).  So within a day, we had set up an online community for our department.  Only our department will be blogging initially, but we were challenged to set the bar high for the rest of the company.  I expect other departments will quickly embrace the blog concept.

So let’s recap.  We’re a five-person IT staff supporting over 300 users at 45 locations.  On the request of our new leadership, we evaluated, selected, installed a corporate collaboration system; implemented what can easily become our corporate Intranet; and started tracking issues department-wide, answering the question, “where do we stand”.  All this in the span of a few weeks, while still supporting the users.  We’ve had a little time to absorb these changes, but looking back, this is a major shift for a company.  These kinds of changes usually happen over months.

Next week will be presentations on what we’ve done.  I’m not sure how many heads will explode.