Tag Archives: Web 2.0

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.

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jQuery: JavaScript That Doesn’t Suck

I hate JavaScript. I mean I really hate JavaScript. Dealing with different implementations of the DOM between browsers is a menace I couldn’t duplicate if I tried. I’ve tried JS libraries from Mootools, script.aculo.us, and so on until recently.

I knew jQuery existed, but I didn’t realize how powerful the language was until recently. When I realized I could select and manipulate DOM elements with CSS selectors then I was off to the races! I love how it’s tailored for designers who already understand that syntax. There is no more getElementById(“search”) or other garbage, because I can write this.

$("search").show();

Now, that is elegant! The only thing more impressive then the way it does selectors is how extensive the API is. Not only is extensive, but it is actually understandable. It’s the perfect balance between extensibility and ease of use. It’s like adding Mootools and script.aculo.us together with better DOM selectors.

Toggle Goodness

I love JavaScript toggles and its variations. It’s much more elegant that simply changing an element from display “none” to “block.” jQuery comes with an easy way to toggle elements, and I recently did something like this at work. 

$(".click").click(function() {
        $(".toggle").slideToggle("fast");
	return false;
});

Ajax With jQuery

jQuery doesn’t stop there. Doing Ajax is simpler than it seems it should be. Here’s a function that onclick will do a GET via Ajax and return a message notifying the user that the request was successful.

$(".ajax").click(function() {
	$.ajax({
    		type: "GET",
    		url: "load.html",
    		dataType: "script"
		})
	$(".successmsg").ajaxSuccess(function(evt, request, settings){
    	        $(this).append("<p>Successful Request!</p>");
	});
});

What if I want to append content into the DOM? Difficult right? Not so much.

$(".append").append("Append some text");

jQuery Plugins

The cool thing for all those effects that jQuery doesn’t provide out-of-the-box then it provides a rich API for users to develop plugins on top of jQuery. For instance, my portfolio utilizes the Coda-Slider jQuery plugin.

At work I was tasked to create some DHTML menus which I believe is a usability nightmare and an IA mistake, but alas I had to. I wanted to maximize the usability, and I found Superfish which is “Suckerfish on ‘roids.” I was able to make sexy menus that had plugins on top of the plugin including the hoverIntent jQuery plugin which is smart enough to know whether you really want the menu or if you’re just trying to move around the page.

Additional Resources

Well, that’s just scratching the surface of what jQuery can do! While learning more about it I’ve found several sites that have helped me.

Tutorials/Blogs
jQuery Plugins
API Documentation
IDE Integration

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Is WordPress “Web 2.0?”

Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress lead, has the following to say on this question.

Someday I think there will be a realization that the real story is more exciting than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame everything in. It’s not just one or two guys hacking on something alone, it’s dozens of people from across the world coming together because of a shared passion. It’s not about selling out to a single company, it’s dozens of companies independently adopting and backing an open source platform for no reason other than its quality. I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.

Finally it’s not Web 2.0, or another bandwagon me-too content management system with AJAX, it’s a mature project that has been around and grown up over four years of hard work, and it has many, many more years of hard work ahead of it. I smile these days when I see WordPress referred to as an “overnight success,” if only they knew how long an overnight success takes.

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