I haven't bothered to follow the whole idea of using blogging in a business context (too much other stuff to read), but a couple articles have blipped on my radar screen.
Rannie points out a Business 2.0 article on business blogs, which provides a cursory overview of potential uses, as well as pointers to software tools available to the would-be business blogger.
A link to a longer and more informative piece on using blogs in business came to me via the Blogger homepage. It's great at expounding the benefits of blogs in a business context, but skims over the problems which may arise in getting a system set up.
Take this attempt at point-by-point refutation of typical nay-sayer arguments (my commentary in italics):
- People won't want to share. Solutions: Immediate benefits are provided by K-Logs to contributors; peer pressure; competitive instinct.
The respect of your peers will only take you so far. If management continues to reward the old knowledge-sharing behaviours, it won't matter how much of an ace the guy in the next cubicle thinks you are.
- People will publish things they shouldn't. Solution: Standard management practice will correct this.
Exactly what "standard management practice" are we referrring to here? Boilerplate HR policy prohibiting the proletariat from posting nudie pics or articles with swear words in them? Is anyone willing to formulate some "best practices" for posting information in this kind of repository? Is someone able to ensure that what's posted is factually correct? Yeah, I thought so.
This also assumes that someone's actually willing to do some managing here. My cynical instincts tell me that the average PHB would assign a minion with no real organizational leverage to "police" the blog. The managers themselves will continue as before.
- Management won't accept the new ideas. Solution: Management that doesn't accept idea flow won't deploy the tool until forced to do it by competitive pressure; most K-Logging won't be as revolutionary as many suspect, but rather dull, evolutionary knowledge transfer (the essence and the heartbeat of life in an organization).
It likely will take the threat of extinction to make the corporate dinosaurs pull their heads out of their asses. Is that going to happen tomorrow? Next year? Is another purported KM "silver-bullet" going be developed in the meantime?
Don't get me wrong -- I agree that blogs would make a fine tool if used correctly. But they're just a tool, and this piece gives "management" too much credit for knowing how to use it.
Actually, at my last place of employ, one of the developers set up a wiki on a Linux box that sat next to his desk. It was really useful for capturing project notes, interesting links, and all sorts of knowledge ephemera that might have been too fragmented for widespread use. The wiki's geek appeal also meant that the developers were more likely to actually use it -- they had a tendency to eschew regular documentation. The four of us in the IA group were big fans of the system as well.
But other areas of the company didn't take to it quite as readily. The completely unstructured nature of linking in a wiki made for difficult navigation. And authoring wiki pages required use of a different markup syntax instead of good ol' HTML. Using a blog instead would help address these concerns. First, the writing would be much easier because you could make use of simple HTML tags instead of fiddling with another weird form of markup. And, if you had a set of categories to which users could assign their posts, that would help make some sense of the muddle.
One useful thing that the wiki had was change tracking. You had a record of all changes made to a page, including when they were made and by whom. Having only a limited familiarity with blogging tools (I use Blogger here, and I have a passing acquaintance with Movable Type thanks to my posting access on thebiglist), I don't know if any of the present tools offer similar functionality. If not, I wouldn't be suprised to learn that someone's working on it.
So, my (present) verdict on blogs for business: "it depends". (How very IA of me.)