Enterprise-Speed Blogging

About 1.5 years ago, a tiny group of dissidents visionaries (the victorious get to re-write history) established a stealth wiki and also started using it's blogging capabilities. This was only the first. Exactly a half-dozen of us have been continuously blogging, internally. Apparently it was a shock to some internal auditors, lawyers, HR and senior execs when they had the original idea of setting up an internal, corporate blog, that one already existed. To their credit, they didn't shut down the stealth blogs.

Anyhow, the point of the post is that it took the enterprise about 1 year from idea to roll-out. Aside from the obvious conclusion that most enterprises are as agile as a cow on skates, the fact that it took people in the enterprise a year to overcome FUD, find/allocate resources and devise a management scheme for a non-revenue-generating internal resource. All this for a simple piece of blogging software that I'm sure any of my readers could have set up and running in an afternoon. That's all the time it took us to set up the original wiki and blog, too. Getting the installation officially blessed took the other 364.5 days.

Proponents of open-source software, Ruby and other dynamic languages, methodologies, etc. need to take into account it takes time to overcome FUD even in light of working proof.