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Blogs
are everywhere, and you know they have reached the point of no return when
corporate IT departments begin to evaluate different blogging software tools
and the topic gets cover story treatment from Business Week and Fast Company,
for those of you that haven't looked at a printed magazine in a while.
But
what got me going was reading the a research report written by
Suw Charman called "Dark
Blogs: The Use of Blogs in Business." The report is a case study of large
European pharmaceutical company's implementation of Traction Software's TeamPage, a commercial blogging tool. Given that the report
was paid for by Traction, you want to take a few of its conclusions with care,
but still it gives some good advice when it comes to implementing blogs in the
corporate world.
There
has been a lot written about using corporate blogs for external communication,
such as the CEO blogs from Schwartz, Cuban et al. But what caught my eye was
how blogs have developed into a new IT tool for internal communications of the
common cubicle dwellers, deep behind the corporate firewall (hence the name
dark blog).
Before
I roll through Charman's conclusions I want to point
out a couple of things that struck me reading her report. The pharma needed some software to keep track of its
competitors and have a central place where researchers and corporate management
could easily capture this information and comment on it. They were having
problems with keeping up to date and getting the right people to discuss what
was going on, and went looking for solutions.
They
weren't happy with their previous systems, using various Web-based intranets
and applications built on top of Lotus Notes. The information they track is
fairly unstructured and comes from lots of different sources. Notes is a very
structured program, which is great for building databases on the fly but not so
great if the information doesn't have a consistent format and structure. The
company wanted something that had the group collaboration dynamic of a blog,
with the flavor of editing-on-the-fly of a wiki that was easy to use and didn't
require special software outside of the Web browser. Does this sound familiar?
I can't tell you how many companies I talk to want something similar. Heck, I
want something similar for my crew here at Tom's.
So what
happened? The company built its blogs (they had several underway, which shows
you how useful they were) in such a way as to tie in with the corporate LDAP
directory structure (for a single user login) and to provide email
notifications when new entries were posted. I think both of these are big
reasons for its success, because it wasn't as technologically disruptive to the
corporate culture as it could have been. Pharmas are
big email consumers, and having a blog technology that fit in with their email
habits was important.
Second,
they ran their blog like we run our publishing mini-empire here at Tom's, with
an editor-in-chief and a publishing process that was well defined to get
material from the individual author to the Web. A lot of people mistake this
process with censorship or control of information, but the actual use (and what
seems to be happening at this pharma company) is to
polish and make the information readable and attractive and organized. The
Traction software also allows for an edit audit trail to see who was editing
what piece when and a permissions system so that not everyone can edit or even
view every piece. Too many blogs are just typing and not a real editorial product.
You need extra pairs of eyes and brains (hopefully both connected and working
together) to make sure that what gets posted makes sense.
Charman mentioned these other lessons:
Charman says in the report that
"Compared to setting up a similar project on a more traditional CMS or KM
platform, the project has been simpler, faster, more effective and less
expensive to implement." And that is perhaps the best lesson for today's IT
departments: find a technology that you can roll out quickly, that doesn't
require a great deal of training, and get the right people behind it. While you
are at it, roll it out to a focused user group to build word of corporate mouth
prior to a company-wide launch.
Looking
for more tips about dark blogs? CIO Insight's Edward Cone offers these
suggestions in
his story about corporate blogging.
Green
and Baker over at Business Week have been having lots of fun tracking corporate
blogging trends since their April cover story. You get the feeling that they
are learning on the job, but that is part of the blogging charm.
And
finally if you want a more
complete comparison by Mike Wallagher.
Granted,
blogs are the new religion, or the new color black, or the return of/son of
push technology or the latest killer app, depending on your time and tenure in
the IT industry. But like so many other corporate IT projects, their success or
failure hinges not on the actual technology itself, but how you finesse the
people parts of the equation and sell the app to userland.
The pharma case study is a good example of these
"softer" parts of the IT equilibrium and how well it can work. It is
nice to see that sometimes IT can get it right and be the good guys for a
change.
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