Blogging the Enterprise

By: David Starr Category:General PostTag: Esoterica, New Post:

I am in the middle of introducing blogs into our workplace. “Good Lord, why?”
you ask? “Aren’t blogs for nerds like you?”

Well, yes. But there’s more. I have found several articles discussing
the advent of blogs within the enterprise, but this is a recent enough development
that there aren’t a lot of use cases out there.

At first blush, I see at least 4 legitimate uses of blogs within the corporate firewall.

Departmental Blogs
.

Departments can use blogs to announce meeting agenda, design breakthroughs, news on
competitors, new ideas to play with, and other news about the company. I have
already started a team blog for our Engineering Team and aggregated it to the
team’s Share Point home page. Nice.>
>Project Blogs
.

Particularly applicable to Scrum, using a blog for broadcasting project
status and accomplishments will allow project teams to cut down on meetings
and status reports. People who are interested in what is happening, but not so interested
that they will attend the Scrums, can get what they need from the blogs. This
also provides a search-able archive of what happened over the course of the project.
Upper management can check in on project progress without tracking down the Scrum
leader to do so.>

Crisis Blogs.

These limited lifetime blogs are a great way of providing communication and transparency
into an operational crisis, like an Exchange Server outage. Different people
involved in the process can post ideas for fixes or operational constraints into the
blog and others in the organization, who aren’t on the A team, can see what is happening
to correct the problem. The blogs can appear and disappear within a
matter of days.>

Executive Blogs

Do smart people within he company have something to say? I bet they do and odds
are that they are saying it to the same people each time. Executives throw their
ideas to the same set of managers and directors that they see every day. Since
it is the job of those folks to insulate the task workers from white noise, the worker
folks are often unaware of the vision. Everyone needs to at least be aware of
what the strategic leaders are thinking about. This invests everyone in
the vision.>>
>

My company is trying this in small doses using Community Server as the engine.
We will see how it evolves.