Instructional designer Natalie Laderas-Kilkenny recently commented on the Dovetail Software blog, calling it a “great example of company blogging in action.”
She adds: “One company is using blogging to expose its mindset to its
customers. People can read how employees are working out solutions.”
Thanks,
Natalie, and that was certainly our intention. We’ve always been an
open company, we learn more that way. There’s a great incentive to stay
sharp when people are watching.
“Having a corporate culture that is worth revealing
can only be done if a company is transparent about its activities on a
blog. That is why blogging, according to many bloggers, is by its
nature more believable and credible than a traditional website [..]
Robert Scoble was the best-known Microsoft blogger because of how he
wrote his blog. In part, the success of the Scobleizer was because
Robert Scoble regularly criticized his own employer, yet still retained
his job at Microsoft.” Transparency
We take Robert Scoble
as a good model (although to be honest we don’t have anything to
criticize in Dovetail), and we admire the concept of Naked
Conversations (how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with
customers). As for our blogs, we like the way it’s working out so far.
In a short period of time we’ve had some astonishingly useful posts
come from our engineers.
Director of Software Development
Gary Sherman posted a wonderful insight, one rarely heard coming from a
software developer, that users don’t want to read the manual. Gary reveals the evolution of his own understanding about “them”, the users.
Joel Spolsky first noted this trait back in the year 2000:
“When you design user interfaces, it’s a good idea to keep two principles in mind:
1. Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it.
2. In fact, users can’t read anything, and if they could, they wouldn’t want to.”
Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives
Our same Gary Sherman posted a more technical piece on custom tweaking business rules in Clarify Rule Manager
in an Amdocs Clarify™ system, using Dovetail’s client rather than the
Clarify Classic Client. These tips are valuable to IT people with
legacy Clarify installs, the kind of people poring over “Clarify Rule
Manager” entries at the ITtoolbox
web site. The support forums contain many items like this, we’re
pleased to be making them more publicly visible through blogs now.
The
blogs work well for product release details also, combining elements of
feature display with reference detail. This allows both IT and business
people to memo their managers with recommendations. See Melissa Burpo’s
screenshot-filled post about the Dovetail Admin 2.4 Release.
More light is shed on the back-room thinking at Dovetail by engineer Steven Weintraub in his post You got to think like your users,
where he makes the point that you have to step out of your work role
and deliberately think like customers, in order to write the correct
rules.
And software Test Engineer Jason Darling talks candidly about his experiences at Dovetail in his posts: Keep your eyes on the ball….Always and Testing is a Team Effort. He notes that the ratio of testers to developers at Dovetail is “about right” at 5 to 1, versus the last place he worked.
Gary Sherman amplifies the importance of testing in his post Automated Testing benefits more than just the tech team.
“As we continue to evolve our products and testing practices, we’re
looking into delivering our tests as part of our product. These tests
are first class citizens, not some left-behind by-product.”
There are more useful posts in the Dovetail blogs, too many to mention here. Do please click here to see all of our posts.
