InfoQ Homepage Communication Content on InfoQ
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Playing with Messaging Chatbots in the Omnichannel Contact Center
The proliferation of messaging platforms is forcing companies to shift towards an omnichannel strategy, where they need to be able to contact people in their preferred channel. In this article we will develop an omnichannel messaging chatbot that offers two-way communications over SMS and Facebook using the Twilio Studio visual tool.
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Agile for Marketing and Communication
Agile Marketing and Communication (MarCom) bridge the IT and communication disciplines. Communication professionals started to apply agile in their projects, which has led to better collaboration and increased productivity and creativity. Professionals take on tasks outside their usual responsibilities and duties, and it's the team that decides how the work is prioritized and done.
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Offshoring Agile When You Are a Startup
Working with an offshore partner becomes faster and cheaper as communication technologies continue to improve. It is possible to achieve agility with an offshore team as long as you understand the limitations. Although some of the principles from the agile manifesto are difficult to reconcile with offshoring, they can still be used as guidance to work effectively together.
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Q&A on the Book Working with Coders
The book Working with Coders is a practical guide to managing teams of software developers aimed at a non-technical audience. In the book, Patrick Gleeson explores how the software development process works and what managers can do to support it effectively and build solid working relationships with coders.
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Driving Architectural Simplicity - The Value, Challenge, and Practice of Simple Solutions
Simple architectures are the most efficient and, subsequently, successful over their lifetime. Achieving simplicity is hard and requires continuous dedication. As an industry, we need to focus more on the system quality of architectural simplicity.
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The Art of Crafting Architectural Diagrams
Architectural diagrams can be useful tools for documenting and communicating the design of a system. They must be self descriptive, consistent, accurate enough and connected to the code. Applying some guidelines can ensure the diagrams are useful to a variety of stakeholders.
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The Role and Importance of Communication in Post-Hierarchical Leadership
Communication is important in a modern, post-hierarchical business. Based on theoretical and empirical research which analysed the role of internal corporate communications in a post-hierarchic leadership system, this article explores fundamentals of post-hierarchic management and leadership and underlines how corporate communications can act as a catalyst to foster and enable such a new paradigm.
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Does IT Industry Need Better Namings?
The IT industry borrows terms from other domains, which is a fairly good approach. But we distort their meanings or use terms in inconsistent ways, within IT and also in comparison to other disciplines. This article shares some of these leaky terminologies with examples, explains why this matters and suggests how to deal with inconsistencies and improve the situation.
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Q&A on the Book Scaling Teams
The book Scaling Teams by Alexander Grosse and David Loftesness provides strategies and practices for managing teams in fast growing organizations. It explores five areas which often pose challenges when organizations need to scale -- hiring, people management, organization, culture and communication -- and gives solutions for recognizing and dealing with those challenges.
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Inclusive Collaboration and the Silence Experiment
With highly collaborative approaches becoming the norm in the software industry, it is time to re-consider collaboration and provide workplaces and practices that embrace all kinds of thinkers. This article introduces Inclusive Collaboration and describes the Silence Experiment to help teams consider different aspects of collaboration and work more effectively with all types of minds.
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Internal Tech Conferences - How and Why
Software engineering today is every bit as much about the people as it is about technology - empowered teams don’t appear overnight. We need to oil the wheels of collaboration so they roll smoothly. Here, Matthew Skelton and Victoria Morgan-Smith discuss how to use internal conferences to boost your organisation’s social capital, the currency by which relationships flourish and businesses thrive.
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The Top 5 Problems with Distributed Teams and How to Solve Them
In this article, Hugo Messer shares the top 5 challenges distributed teams face along with practical solutions. They are based on his 6 books, many workshops and a decade of hands on experience. The top 5 challenges: 1. We're thinking 'us versus them'; 2. Keeping the team in the dark; 3. Culture is a mystery; 4. We stop communicating; 5. The black box.