Great Article in CIO Insight Magazine on Corporate Blogging
CIO Magazine recently did an interview with Robert Scoble (http://www.cioinsight.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=190067,00.asp). One of the key takeaways from the piece (at least for me) is Scoble's justification for corporate blogging. By now, everyone knows MOSS has a blog template. In theory, that should open the door to blogs inside the firewall and a new system for knowledge capture. The reality is that this change will not come easily. Executives will need to understand why blogging is good and safe and useful.
Below is Scoble's response to the question many companies are asking... “why blog?”. His point is very well articulated...
One of the problems at a big company is the e-mail flow. Let's say I was the manager of a sales team, 60 or 100 salespeople, and every day I wanted a report from them on what they were doing, their experiences, did they close sales. The old way was, everyone would e-mail it to me. Now it's cluttering up my inbox, maybe keeping me from seeing an important e-mail exchange I should have with a customer. And it doesn't let the employees help each other. It locks the knowledge into these silos.
Let's say I left the company—my replacement wouldn't have access to that information. When I left Microsoft, I left a gig and a half of e-mail that neither I nor my replacement has access to. I'm not allowed to look at it, and Microsoft has it stored on a server somewhere, but they don't share it with employees, because it's private. So my replacement can't look into it, and my coworkers can't see any of the knowledge I was storing there. And I was storing quite a bit, actually. But if I could get that knowledge out and put it on a blog, then that stuff stays around, because the blog doesn't get closed down. It's also searchable, so a manager or employee can look for keywords.
You become a far better organization when you share that kind of reporting information with each other, behind the firewall. Blogging is easy, whereas a lot of knowledge management systems are hard to use, and you hate using them, you have to get trained to use them. With a blog you go to a URL and type in a box.