CIO Insight is taking a look at blogs, mainly internal blogs, these simple, low-cost publishing and collaboration software, expanding within companies, whether technology management is ready or not.
“… the other side of the story is taking place inside corporate firewalls—in an area that, traditionally, has been the realm of technology managers. Here, blogs (and the simple databases known as wikis) offer an alternative not only to e-mail, but also to even more expensive systems for project and knowledge management that often prove unpopular with workers, who find them difficult and unrewarding to use. You may not be thinking about blogs, but somebody at your company probably is— if they aren’t using them already.”
For a change, it is interesting to read an article from the perspective of IT people. Also, it is encouraging to read that even CIOs, who may be the only people sometimes resisting the rise of the blog, give several examples of easy adoption: “Engineers learning a new version of a big software package, for example, preferred using a training blog that allowed them to leave questions and comments instead of using an existing document management system described by Angeles as cumbersome.”
The phenomenon is still in its early years: “A simple blog that begins as a project-management log for a small group can become a searchable knowledge-management repository when the project is done… Blogs and wikis could lead to some grand accomplishments that are only beginning to come into focus. The success of Wikipedia, a Web-based encyclopedia created and edited by thousands of volunteers, suggests that companies might also engage in collaboration at a profound scale.”
On the subject of tools and costs: “The software, which allows dozens of people to post news and updates to calendars, project pages, and policy documents without going through an administrator, or learning HTML, works better than an intranet built using Microsoft’s FrontPage, which it replaced. The distributed authorship of people from different departments means the content is fresher. The blog software also obviated the need to invest in an expensive new content management system. This is an internal project of the Web team, done without capital outlay and with minimal IT staff time. The CIO is aware of it, and how it works, but it saves him money before he knows that the money might have had to be spent.”
Via Ross Mayfield.
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