Blogging

Tell us about yourself

I’m a business intelligence developer for a Fortune 100 manufacturer here in Memphis, TN.  At work I build web reporting solutions that highlight meaningful trends within the millions of actions taken by our manufacturing, delivery, and sales units on a daily basis.  At home I like to take walks to the neighborhood park with my wife, our daughter, and our dog. Lately we watch a good bit of network TV on Hulu.

What’s your blog all about?

Sharing at Work is about helping people get things done in a contemporary office environment.  Since I work in IT many posts are about applications that I’m testing for use at my office.  I also post on more people-oriented topics like “how to get the rest of your office interested in your new social media project”.  That part’s usually tougher than finding some serviceable tools.

How do you see the workplace changing over the next 10 years? What technologies will lead this change?

I think we’re going to collectively move away from private one to one communications like email and start communicating in public as much as possible with services similar to Twitter and Facebook.  We’ll still need email-type services for private messages, but doing our knowledge work in the light of day winds up benefiting more people in the long run.

What was your last great idea?

My current big idea – I’m still working on it – is taking my grassroots effort to promote internal social networking away from the IT organization and trying to locate “collaboration champions” in other departments.  Training, communication, and diversity are some obvious departments to speak with, and they might be better positioned to promote the “sharing at work” cause.

What is the one thing that you constantly think about?

“How can I convince the business world to stop using e-mail as the center of our office productivity workflow?” I know that sounds a bit odd, but that’s what I’m thinking of 9 times out of 10 when working on the blog.  E-mail has been the default in business for a decade or two now.  I won’t say we need to get rid of e-mail entirely, but it’s used in many cases where we’d be far better served with tweets, wikis, or phone calls.

What are you reading right now?

I’m currently reading Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb.  It’s a bit of a sci-fi/fantasy thing that I got in a free promotion on the Amazon Kindle store.  It’s not the best book I’ve ever read, but the novelty of reading a book on my iPod has supplemented its entertainment value enough to keep me going for a few hundred pages.

My favorite blogs are Heather Armstrong’s Dooce (parenting, family life, and the business of running a blog about them), Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist (career advice with a lot of Ms. Trunk’s personal life thrown in), and Scott Jennings’s Broken Toys (MMOGs, virtual economies, virtual worlds, game design).  I probably read a hundred other blogs but these three are the ones I come back to the most often.  Other favorites are Louis Gray’s early adopter tech blog (where I have occasionally submitted an article of my own) and Gates of Memphis, a local blog focused on the city.

What do you think is your best blog post?

I tend to like most of my posts, and if I don’t I’ll revise them.  Here’s one from last week that bottled some workplace-related energy I was feeling and connects it with several pet ideas on internal social networking: Setting up an internal Facebook might just solve your company’s communications and engagement problems.

Where else can people find you online?

Friendfeed is my #1 online destination.  Find me as user Daniel J. Pritchett / dpritchett.

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