When Al Essa was the CIO at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, he faced many of the challenges of any IT, or other department, lead. There were multiple projects that needed to be monitored and teams to be coached. Al wanted to become more of a coach than a monitor so he had each team create a blog forum for every project. Managers now provided updates and everyone in the department could access all project blogs inside the firewall.

The project blogs acted as true dashboards. Al could review each project’s status on line and drill down for more detail as needed. He could also point project teams to others who faced the same issues. These status reports were now available to everyone in his department, so cross-project communication was a simple matter, a by-product of the new blog reporting platform. The instant, secure, and constant accessibility, in searchable format, that blogs brought was a huge productivity improvement over swapping project reports and commentary through multiple emails.

Al was not done with what has become Enterprise 2.0. Every year, his department is required to develop a business plan for the coming year. In the past Al wrote these plans himself, a time consuming task. Then he spent even more time getting input and buy-in from his staff for the coming year’s efforts. Drafts were circulated and responded to primarily through email.

Al turned to blogs and wikis to involve his entire staff, dramatically reducing the development time, and improving the quality of the plan. In contrast to blogs, wikis are optimized for the collaborative creation of content. Blogs support the personal voice of the author. Wikis support a group voice through their open editing capabilities.

First, Al set up a blog to describe the business plan requirements to his department members. The blog included the tactical concerns, such as content requirements, deadlines, processes, and budget guidelines. It also laid out the strategic issues, the narrative that needed to convey the vision for the coming year. Al selected a blog so he could control this educational content and ensure his staff received the correct instructions. His staff could post comments and ask questions until they completely understand the task requirements. Everyone could see the questions and his answers, saving time and creating a common understanding.

Once everyone was clear on the task, the collaboration could begin on a solid foundation. Al then switched to a wiki, with its universal editing privileges, to actually create the business plan so each of his staff could participate. In the end, he submitted a business plan that the entire department had a chance to shape. This both improved quality and eliminated the old step of socializing the plan through emails and attachments and numerous isolated personal discussions. His staff bought into the plan as part of the process of jointly shaping the content and was better prepared and motivated to execute it in the coming year.

This is a small example of the opportunities ahead for innovative IT guys as long as this term has not become an oxymoron. Joe McKendrick’s recent post, Will SOA Open to the Cloud in 2007?, implied there may be some hope.