Rick Devenuti, our SVP renews pledge to maintain his blog.

Rick Devenuti has a blog - not many know it - but - yes he does. So does my General Manager (Hardeep Walia) In today's All-Hands conference call for Microsoft Enterprise Services he brought up the issue of blogging all by himself. I was given the chance to be in the passive audience early morning hearing him give his quarterly speech that helps the field and teams refocus and deliver on yearly commitments.

As always - Numbers first.... RickDe's blog has been up since Aug 15 (Independence day for India - no significance to this post - but still!) and it has one post. No seriously - One post. Hardeep Walia - is not far behind on this - his blog started end Sept and has 1 post in it. So it should come as no surprise if the feedback has been that the blog is not maintained. Seriously - In anybody's opinion the blog did not even get started really. Alarmingly both the posts got 3 comments - which had great conversational hooks - but a dialog never got started.

Executive Blogging supporters are on the rise. Which executive in their right mind would say no to it? Yes it is a great way to stay in touch for business leaders with their community of partners, customers, communities, prospects, investors, leaders, industry and the field blogs are an informal opt-in approach to know who are the uber-connected and going-beyond people in the org. Yes It is a great open dialog that can forge a several relationships which talks, videos, concalls and emails just do not lend itself to.

Executive Blogging is tough on the execs. But then the execs rarely have time to write a blog post and more importantly respond to comments - not just here but even in other teams across MS and also other firms. And time is not that small an issue - these are ppl who's every minute is owned by their admins that they barely get to see their kids grow up.

So while I have been critical about my team - I think it was great to have RickDe come and out and say he is going to do something about it. I do hope he follows up on this, as always, because thinking about blogging topics and writing about them does take commitment and more importantly - Time & Energy.