Transparency and corporations and blogging, oh my Supposedly blogging is about transparency, transparency, and more transparency. The people who invented blogging like transparency, and espouse that as a core virtue of blogging. As I've written before, I contend that a blog is a web site and you can use the blog/web-site any which way you want.
In any case Sun, with blogs.sun.com, is rather famously experimenting with transparency. Supposedly this has made a great change in Sun's fortunes, as Jonathan Schwartz is quoted in this article: Transparency is the key.
I honestly don't know whether the result (Sun moving from 99th to 6th most popular server vendor) can be ascribed to the blogging, or the fact that we have a more interesting lineup of products. I tend to think it's the latter. On the other hand it's real interesting the quality of information we (Sun's blogging engineers) are able to publish. Certainly we, Sun's blogging engineers, are passionate about Sun (we probably wouldn't still be here if we weren't passionate about Sun), and a core value of successful blogs is passion for what the blogger writes about.I've been thinking a lot about corporate blogging, and one idea that comes up is how "Transparency" really conflicts with typical corporate procedure.
Typically corporations tell their employees "don't speak to the press", and to direct all press inquiries to the public relations department. Presumably PR has some genetic mutation that gives them the required super powers to withstand the death ray emanated by the usual "press" person...?
(to any "press" people reading this - that was a joke)
(honest)
It appears the typical corporation practices secrecy. There's a whole range of reasons for secrecy, such as preserving competitive advantage, the element of surprise, and so forth. In some cases secrecy also allows the company to get away with illegal activities.
In the U.S. we have "Freedom of Speech" enshrined in the Constitution. But once you sign an employment contract, your freedom of speech flies out the window. I learned this one Sunday morning a year ago after writing a blog posting about a legal settlement Sun had lost. A big-wig at Sun called me, at home, on a Sunday morning, about 30 minutes later saying I'd better take that posting down because it's against corporate policy to discuss ongoing legal proceedings. Hmmm... but what about my freedom of speech rights? Well, if I wanted to remain employeed I would abide by the policy, so I did, especially as the particular case wasn't worth fighting over.
That's corporate secrecy in action.
Another example is this new CPU chip with the cool threads technology and whatnot. The first I heard of that chip was an internal presentation 2-3 years ago. But could I talk about it to the public? Nooo... corporate secrecy again. In this case there's an interesting argument to make, in that as the chip is developed the plans and details might well change. But if we were to disclose those plans to the public, then it would be harder to change them later. That's beside the obvious competitive advantage angle, because if Intel or IBM or HP or whatnot company were to have known about the strategic move we're making to lower power density per server, the window of opportunity might shrink as the other companies would then have an ability to match their products with ours much earlier.
Is that transparency? To keep certain plans secret until they're ready to be revealed? Hmmm...
What we're doing with blogs.sun.com is certainly a breath of fresh air. When we shipped dtrace, for example, our bloggers were in full force writing about how to use it. I'm sure that had a lot to do with perking interest in Solaris, and helping people learn to use dtrace.
But is what we're doing really transparent? I don't think so. A few months ago everybody was required to take a training in protecting "Intellectual Property". For example there's a whole slew of information we generate inside Sun which aren't to be disclosed. For example if we have a joint venture with another company, we're supposed to set up intellectual property procedures to ensure everybody in all associated companies are on the same page about keeping the whole ballowax confidential. This is typical business-as-usual, and I don't see it as being transparent.
But the mere fact that I can be writing this, using company owned infrastructure, is an example of a shift of corporate consciousness. And I believe this is a positive change.
(2006-01-07 17:15:45.0) Permalink
