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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Saturday, July 27, 2002Blogging the Enterprise
Corporate blogging is becoming the latest rage. John Robb has been there from the beginning with his K-Logs (Knowledge Management Weblogs) stuff. There's the Using Blogs in Business chapter of the Blogroots book, the Are You Blogging Yet article from Information Week, and numerous weblog posts that have passed through my aggregator recently.
My take is that current weblog tools are inappropriate for long-term knowledge management and transfer. Weblogs are great at capturing thought processes, in a date-centric manner. However, someone's thoughts do not equate to their knowledge. What someone was thinking about last month probably won't be very useful in training their replacement this month.
That's not to say that weblogs aren't useful in a business setting. Weblogs can improve communication, cut down on e-mail overload, and help new hires to integrate themselves and understand internal processes. Wonderful stuff. And of course, weblogs are easy. Anyone can start a weblog in minutes, with a miniscule budget and little IT involvement.
Real knowledge management and transfer is hard. People with knowledge need to be identified, their knowledge recorded, reviewed, organized, and made available to others in a consistent manner. Sensitive information needs to be identified and secured. Stale information must be found and updated or removed.
In the early stages this process can be time-consuming and expensive. At my former employer we had two people dedicated to KM for our Systems Administration group alone (probably 60 SAs worldwide). Factoring in the contributions by individual SAs and my part-time work building the CMS, I figure that KM for our group cost around $300,000 in 2001.
We probably doubled our investment from the reduction in training expenses alone. "Soft" savings, such as quicker problem resolution time and fewer escalations to Senior SAs, likely generated another $1 Million per year in savings.
If I were still maintaining that CMS...
The key feature to our CMS was that it was very simple for any user to submit new documents. It had rudimentary workflow features: all documents had to be categorized and approved before being made available to other users. The system was completely web-based, database-driven, and fairly extensible: the last features that I added were to provide PGP Keyserver functionality and to integrate an external discussion group system.
If I were adding new features today, I would be thinking about user empowerment. One of my last thoughts had been to give users their own workspace, where they could manage their own documents, make them available to their team, and submit relevant documents to the standard KM process as they deemed necessary.
Today I would extend the concept further by building weblog functionality within that workspace. We would gain the inherent benefits of blogging, which are certainly worthwhile, while also making it easy to capture important entries within the full KM process (where they can be properly categorized, indexed, and made available to all users in a consistent manner).
