On a recent job I was presented with the task of getting the global network and components documented. The company was going through a great deal of growth and culture change, and the network was changing daily.

Some of the 'old guard' technical staff were not happy with the way things were going, some were just not very articulate, some weren't as knowledgeable as they would have liked people to think, and all of them were so swamped that they had no time (or inclination) to do documentation--at any rate, all of the information about the network was locked up in the technical staffs' brains, and none of it was documented.

I determined that the documentation needed to be up-to-date and available to the 7X24 worldwide support staff, and an intranet web site was the most appropriate delivery method. I could possibly extract the information I couldn't get from the technical staff from network analysis tools, but unless the technical people provided the information and then took 'ownership' of the on-line information, the web site information would be obsolete and useless almost as soon as it was posted. Obviously, a system problem that needed 'virtuous circle' solutions!

I negotiated web site space and access for an internal web site from the Marketing group that 'owned' the servers, and set about getting the information. Every time I got a bit of information from one of the technical staffers, I immediately created a Visio graphic and asked the originator to verify the information (short feedback loop). As soon as the graphic was satisfactory, I posted it on-line, making sure the originators name and the date were on the page, (more feedback) then sent an e-mail to management and the rest of the technical staff with a note praising the value of the information and crediting the originator. Management often added their praise. This created a 'pull' situation, making it easier for me to get more information from others. Once a critical amount of information was posted to the internal web site, it became the network information source standard. I was pleased to hear the technical staff complain that someone had failed to check the on-line information before taking an action (one virtuous circle down, one to go!). We had a fully operational web site with over 100 pages documenting every network and most of the major components in both graphic and text form, with links drilling down from the global to the local, on-call schedules, and vendor and employee contact information. With management support, an upcoming IT changes web form was created so that the tech staff could post directly to a web page without coding html, and this information was used as a metric for evaluating outages. Efforts were in place to integrate a network monitoring tool, a component inventory tool and the help desk trouble tickets on-line.

Even though most of the information was being posted, there was still the problem of web production ownership. Instead of handing off the updates, the information needed to come directly from the knowledge workers to the web page. As long as I was available to do the updates, there was no incentive for the technical staff to learn the tools--I had done too good a job-- and an expensive contractor was in danger of becoming a glorified web page editor and a gatekeeper/bottleneck to the posting process (success to the successful, shifting the burden to the intervenor).

With management support and a timely assignment to unrelated work, I was able to step back and advise the technical staff that I would no longer be able to keep up with all of the updates, but would provide technical support for their own efforts. The hardest part of this phase was knowing when to take on the conversion to html when information was provided and when to push back, and then convincing management that exceptions were warranted for those who had not yet managed to get documentation on-line, and dealing with unhappy technical staff when I didn't. I needn't have worried, the technical staff grumbled a bit, then learned the tools and created some fantastic reference web pages. I provided some 'look and feel' standards, and left at the end of the contract with the warm feeling that the intranet web site I had been instrumental in setting up would serve the company well.

All in all, this was a very satisfying assignment, working with some great people, in a good company, and making good use of my systems skills.

Note: references to systems terms used in this note can be found in Peter Senge's book, the Fifth Discipline. It's a bit simplistic, but good reading for those who are not familiar with systems thinking.