Siolon

Blogging in the Enterprise

Ellen Simon­etti received an unex­pected call from her employer, Delta, telling her that her man­ager needed to “talk” to her. Ellen found out that her employer was fir­ing her for pos­ing “inap­pro­pri­ate” pic­tures on her blog. Despite her clean per­for­mance record, she was given no warn­ing and ter­mi­nated. For some­thing she thought was harm­less it spilled into her pro­fes­sional life and adversely effected her.

It’s sto­ries like this that has given cor­po­ra­tions a bad taste for the idea of blog­ging. It is seen as some­thing that adds no real busi­ness value and instead detracts the employee from get­ting “real work” done or even worse smear­ing the image of the orga­ni­za­tion. After all, peo­ple on MySpace blog but no one “pro­fes­sional” does this. What do we then do with these new ECM solu­tions, includ­ing Share­Point 2007, that include blog­ging mod­ules? Do we ignore them? Is it really that bad?

I have actu­ally become quite con­victed that blog­ging by employ­ees can add immense value to com­pa­nies in terms of knowl­edge management.

The Case for Blogging

What’s inter­est­ing about this is that most cor­po­rate executives/managers don’t seem to rec­og­nize that when they search on the Inter­net often times what they’re look­ing for is found on blogs. These can be answers to ques­tions, similarly-minded indi­vid­u­als to col­lab­o­rate with, and much more. Google has real­ized this and has even cre­ated a spe­cial­ized search just through blog con­tent. There is much to be learned.

Peter Kol­lock has pub­lished a fan­tas­tic arti­cle enti­tled “The Economies of Online Coöper­a­tion” where out­lines the three major rea­sons why indi­vid­u­als par­tic­i­pate in knowl­edge exchange. One of which, antic­i­pated reci­procity, is a great exam­ple of how blogs do just that.

If each per­son shares freely, the groups as a whole is bet­ter off, hav­ing access to infor­ma­tion and advice that no sin­gle per­son might match. […] If the pos­si­bil­ity of future rec­i­p­ro­ca­tion is the moti­va­tion dri­ving an individual’s con­tri­bu­tion, then the like­li­hood of pro­vid­ing pub­lic goods will be increased to the extent indi­vid­u­als are likely to inter­act with each other in the future and to the extent that there is some way to keep track of past actions (for exam­ple, by mak­ing sure con­tri­bu­tions are seen by the group as a whole or by pro­vid­ing archives of past actions and contributions).

This is exactly why peo­ple blog. There is a per­ceived reci­procity in pro­vid­ing this infor­ma­tion. The sec­ond moti­va­tion, increased rep­u­ta­tion, is also impor­tant. These two fac­tors explain why peo­ple blog on issues other than their dogs. Here is a sum­ma­tion of rea­sons for allow­ing blog­ging in the enterprise.

• Employ­ees will want to share infor­ma­tion if they receive credit
• Employ­ees will want to share infor­ma­tion if their professional/personal rep­u­ta­tion can be increased (lead­ing to a sub­ject mat­ter expert label)
• Employ­ees will want to share infor­ma­tion if there is a per­ceived future ben­e­fit for doing so

These are pow­er­ful moti­va­tions. Surely it is enough to con­sider the oppor­tu­nity for dra­matic knowl­edge transfer.

Argu­ments Against Blog­ging in the Enterprise

“My employ­ees will pub­lish some­thing con­trary to our prin­ci­ples thereby tar­nish­ing our image.”

This is a prob­lem not with blogs or any other medium for knowl­edge exchange. If users can­not exer­cise restraint in this regard then it is a peo­ple prob­lem and not one with blogs or other related meth­ods. When an employee knows they will be held account­able for con­tent they are less likely to do some­thing detri­men­tal to their careers. Fur­ther, you can enable only intranet-based blogs which allow the con­tent to be only shared inter­nally and also indexed for users to search against that information.

“Our employee pro­duc­tiv­ity will decrease.”

This is also a prob­lem not with blogs but peo­ple. Imag­ine if one of your employ­ees has a valu­able “les­son learned” in a crit­i­cal busi­ness process. By enabling them to write about their expe­ri­ence the con­tent can be dis­sem­i­nated to other employ­ees to avoid even­tual pro­duc­tiv­ity decrease. I believe a strong argu­ment can be made that by dis­abling blog­ging in the enter­prise that that will cause poten­tial pro­duc­tiv­ity loss.

Final Points

By enabling blog­ging in the enter­prise on top­ics related to the busi­ness you have actu­ally enabled pow­er­ful knowl­edge trans­fer and reten­tion. It will also facil­i­tate strong com­mu­nity, dia­logue, and increased busi­ness pro­duc­tiv­ity. Don’t make the mis­take of not using tools to their poten­tial and quench­ing poten­tial areas of knowl­edge trans­fer. By prop­erly train­ing and enabling your employ­ees you will find you will max­i­mize your ROI in your ECM solution.