eWeek has an interview with John Patrick on weblogs and their use by businesses. Some excerpts:
Knowledge management wasn’t overhyped. It was underdelivered. Blogs can potentially deliver the grassroots discussions and knowledge-sharing that top-down, corporate-sponsored efforts never could.
There is no question in my mind that blogging is already beginning to reshape how information is created, published and shared. Blogs have the power to introduce new voices into the mix, which will enrich the quality of information available. Voices not necessarily heard before, thanks to limitations of money, access or hierarchyyou’re not the CEO, you’re just a guy with a big ideanow you can bridge those gaps. Say you’re a CIO who wants to develop some thought leadership around the need to rethink the company’s approach to mobile workforce strategies. Blogs can give you access to the grassroots and to your peers that you might not otherwise have had.
Today, employees have their intranets, but the intranet is the data dumpster. Everything is there but you can’t find what you want. Much of the content is old and no longer relevant. What employees want is a current view on a topic. They want to find what the experts are thinking so they can leverage that experience. Corporate blogs will become the source. Companies will also use blogging to share their news and views with their customers and suppliers.
The goal is to improve the leveraging of the expertise within the department and across the corporation…[Blogging is] a way to energize the expertise from the bottomin other words, to allow people who want to share, who are good at sharing, who know who the experts are, who talk to the experts or who may, in fact, be one of those experts, to participate more fully. We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that’s going on.
People won’t go to the company intranet to search for information. Instead, they’ll look in blogs see what people they trust and respect have to say.
Create a blog central, which might be company.com/blogcentral. On that Web page can be a list of the blogs of the experts or the representatives of those experts organized by subjects important to the companymetallurgy and Linux and CRM and so forth. They might find relevant information or links to other resources they didn’t know about.
Excellent ideas. We need to think how we can take the blogging phenomenon and apply it to organisations in India.
