Blogging Moves Into the Enterprise | T. Rowe Price Hits the Ground Running | Messaging Fit for FIX: Was IM Made to Order? | The Independent Chair Rule: Milestone or Millstone? | Company Index |
Blogging Moves Into the Enterprise
October 1, 2004
Every so often, a new technology will bubble up from front-line employees, causing managers to sweat bullets until they figure out how to deal with it. In an industry with many "Chinese walls," for example, instant messaging once had managers making extra dates with the cardiologist. The same might now be said of blogging.
Consider a recent CBS News story on the president's National Guard service. "Citizen journalists," publishing on personal Web sites, were so successful at calling into question the authenticity of memoranda on the subject, released on a Thursday, that by Monday, William Safire was endorsing their analysis in The New York Times.
Any investor relations department that has weathered a "whispering campaign" in an online chat room will sympathize with the CBS fact-checking team. Even so, many senior managers that Compliance talked to for this story-we won't name any names-didn't yet know what blogging was.
A blog--short for Web log--is an online diary. Pioneered by Web developers, who started posting links and commentary they wanted to share with colleagues, the most prolific bloggers on the Internet now are teenage girls.
Blogging is self-publishing for dummies. Unlike designing a Web site, setting up a blog takes a few minutes and no technical knowledge. The Web site is stripped down to its core elements-a date stamp, some text and a few links to other sites.
Entries appear in reverse chronological order, with the most recent on top. Public blogging services, such as Google's Blogger, enable authors to archive older entries; limit or expand posting rights and access to content; and run keyword searches on archived posts.
Many blog hosts are free or extremely low-cost. Users may also download free or inexpensive software--such as the popular Movable Type--and host blogs on their own server, or on the server of the company they work for.
"Blogging is a primary way to share knowledge," said John Patrick, president of Attitude LLC, former vp of Internet technology at IBM and author of Net Attitude. "It empowers those with knowledge to write about it with no constraints."
The Joy of Blogging
Employees love blogging. Even a blog read by no one except its
author serves as a useful repository of notes, documents and links.
Readers who leave comments can contribute valuable information to
that repository. And blogs written by multiple readers are perfect
for keeping a small group updated about projects or shared
interests.
A blog can also help individuals build a reputation as subject-matter experts within an organization or in the wider world, and make that expertise available across organizational boundaries.
At Atlantic Financial, the Westboro, Mass.-based investment firm, an internal blog helps employees keep each other up-to-date on what's happening at the company. "It's a great alternative to memos and e-mails for certain types of communications," says Bruce Fenton, the firm's founder and president.
Blogs also make a good alternative to formal knowledge management systems, some blogging experts say. "The historical mistake is to regard knowledge as something separate from both employees and from context," said Clay Shirky, an independent consultant, blogger and professor in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.
"Most knowledge management software is based on the idea that we can knock employees' skulls open and drop the knowledge into a database," Shirky says. Employees dislike this process, of course, but even if it worked perfectly, the most useful knowledge often can't be codified because it's still being formed. "What a Web log does is give people an outboard brain--a place to record some of these thoughts that are somewhere between completely unformed and something ready for publication."
