At work, we create weekly reports to let our boss know what we're doing.  The important stuff then get pushed up the chain of command so that upper management knows what we're doing.  When I first started at Motorola, I automated the system our group used so that it was a web-based app that emailed the report at the end of the week.  It went through several iterations and feature additions over the years.

Recently, after I began blogging both at home and at work, I noticed a striking similarity between blogging and entering our weekly reports.  We scrapped the old system and built one that uses the RSS syndication of our blogs to publish the weekly report.  We've used it the last several weeks and it's a fantastic hierarchical model.

This week, we began to see the real power of this approach.  We recently wrote some software to aid in embedded memory bitmapping on devices we test. I posted an image of a memory defect the software found to my bog, and it was automatically aggregated, and emailed up the chain as part of the report.

I'm trying to get management to let us clean up the report software and sell or license it because it's pretty sweet.

Motorola is supposed to be shut down this week, so our group is taking the opportunity to do some data migration. Everything is working, but it is taking longer than expected. At the rate things are running, it will take several weeks to run the migration. We were working till about midnight Tuesday trying to make it faster.

So we're going to do some very tricky things instead that allows us to gain some of the advantages of the migration without actually having to do it. Needless to say, it has been an interseting experience.