Blogs within corporation

This is a very wide topic, of course, so I will start with what I wrote on my company's internal blog (no link, for obvious reasons) as a preparation for an interview with journalist from a specialist journal who gave us this synopsis.

In recent years, web logs (or 'blogs') have proliferated across the Internet. These public online diaries, updated regularly with the owner’s comments, news and recommended Internet links, have typically been published by private individuals. However, organisations are starting to see the blog’s potential as a fast, informal way to share information - project updates, research or test results, product release news, industry headlines - with employees, suppliers and customers. This feature will examine the business, organisational and technology changes needed to support a corporate blog and how the blog format can sit alongside established collaborative mediums such as email and document sharing applications.

What can blogs offer to businesses that more traditional forms of corporate collaboration do not?

What are traditional forms of corporate collaboration:

• email


• intranets


• IM


• shared networks


• conference calls


• meetings

What is the objective of corporate collaboration:

• effective management of processes


• communication


• distribution of information


• knowledge creation/evolution


• people management - satisfaction, personal growth etc

Are current forms of corporate collaboration doing their job? I don't think so. Email is often a distraction rather than effective communication tool, intranets, web portals are boring and usually mean an extra chore rather than being an effective tool. Collaboration software, if installed, is imposed top down with insufficent training and motivation to the individual employee.

This leads to a more general point about knowledge management and collaboration - technology and tools are seen as an organisational phenomenon. The focus should be on the individual, the organisation will follow. A true bottom-up approach. Managing personal information, 'individual knowledge space' first, before a company gets to see benefit of KM and collaboration technology.

Blog is an individual tool with impact both on the blogger and the reader/commenter. It can act as a filter of captured and evolving knowledge, it is a content management system that is sufficiently simple to be flexible and sufficiently robust to be effective. The features that make a blog an ideal tool for emergent knowledge management is speed, flexibility, interactivity, and ability to spread information outward.

Blogs can also be business intelligence tools - an early warning system to alert organisations to developments that require a response. Every signal is a noise, only when it is filtered it becomes information. Blog is a format with informal, loose and simple enough structure to capure signals, but structured enough to give emergence to data-patterns i.e. information and knowledge. Blogs as early warning systems would work in larger organisations where natural communication flows have been disrrupted. It is a perfect tool to fit the gap created by remote business processes. Blogs create and aggregate enormous amount of pre-filtered background noise. They can also turn your employees into trusted hubs to reconnect to social network inside and outside the organisation.

Blog as a project management tool - a way to capture and maintain unstructured input in a structure but informal envirnoment. This is where interactivity is paramount. For example, I have set up and ran two our project blogs, which have proven an amazing virtual resource for all project members. The most amazing effect occurred after a couple of months of blogging for one of the project blogs. We had an impromptu meeting with one of the people who travels widely and is hard to pin down but who had been reading the blog regularly. As a result, we could start talking about the project instantenously without presentations, documents as we were all aware of what the others think and know. This is because all the information, links, ideas, articles etc had been described or linked to on the blog. We were all on the same blog page, so to speak.

Here are some examples of corporations that use internal blogs: InfoWorld, DaimlerChrysler, Sun Microsystems, IBM and, of course, Microsoft with around 1,000 employees with blogs. That's what I call a good start, but there is a way to go...

Comments

[laurent bervas]

I find it interesting, but I don't think that the blog is efficient as a corporate tool.

I don't believe that employees can blog freely within a corporation.

I don't like Microsoft strategy of blogging that consists of grouping blogs into one single feed.
In my opinion it's a deliberate strategy.
It's difficult to find something subversive among 500 daily posts.
I prefer that each has a separate feed.

I tried blogging for managing a project. I'm not convinced that it's efficient.

For managing projects I need more structured tools.
I prefer real knowledge management tools with more powerful search functions, etc...

As a manager I don't need all the history of the projet. I prefer more synthetic documents.

I think blogs are individual tools. They are the expression of free thoughts.

[Adriana Cronin-Lukas]

Hm, I know of a number of corporation that are using internal blogs to great benefit to them and their employees. Depends what you mean by blogging freely... Blogging a project should be an answer to the problem of information sharing and engagement of those who are needed for the project. It's not about opinions or power play but about the flow of information in a neutral fashion to make sure all know what is going on. Surely, that can only be a good thing. In fact a blog can redress the power imbalances within a corpration where cc or bcc to an email becomes a power tool for those with 'information'.

I have experience with a project blog and we started it as a scrapbook for our ideas, instead of exchanging interminable emails. In the end we were all stunned by the effectivness of the blog as project tool. Especially people who did not really know much about blogging to start off with. The problem with 'structured' tools is that they do not encourage creativity and cooperation. Blog does not give you 'history' of the project, you get what I call an emergent knowledge. The whole point of blogging is to encourage people to take ownership of the project, not being a mere cog in the wheel. Most KM tools fail because they are impersonal, built around the system and not the agents participating in the knowledge creation.

Also, you do not 'manage' a project by blogging, you use the blog to conduct your project management better. Two separate issues.

To sum up, blog is not just a tool to be applied to the current problems, it is a tool that enables organisations to evolve to another level of dealing with knowledge, project management and internal communication. And yes, not all companies are capable of such move. I don't think Microsoft actually 'gets' blogging, some of its employees do but that's not the same thing.

[Suman]

I have implemented blogs on the intranet in two companies. While in Wipro Technologies, I implemented a blog system for a group of 30 people. The group is further divided into smaller teams that interact with the client in USA. It was interesting to note that people discover new uses of weblogs: one of the guys thought it makes an excellent 'minutes-of-the-meeting' tool. I used blogs to manage documentation projects (reviews from engineers, research questions posted to blog etc). Most of them used it as a place to store information as they found it was easier to retrieve information from a blog (with archives, search etc); information like: path to a server, internal URLs, checklists, etc. Infact the lab admin runs a blog and keeps people posted on downtime, upgrades etc. Trust this was of help to you guys.

[Neville Hobson]

Some interesting comments. I believe blogs (and wikis) definitely have a place within organizations as a communication tool, one that will help develop more effective employee engagement, thus leading to more effective customer relationships.

Last week, I presented on blogs and wikis at a conference in Amsterdam to about 80 senior communication professionals from companies across Europe. Not a single one of those companies uses blogs... yet.

In Europe, awareness of these tools and what they can do for organizations is rising, but not as quickly as I would like to see.

Nevertheless, I'm optimistic about how this picture will change as we go forward.

[Elizabeth Albrycht]

Neville,

What was the number one barrier to getting started blogging shared with you by these 80 professionals?