Some Question The Value Of State Worker Blogs

from the build-it-and-they-won't-come dept

I'm very interested in the use of blogs within business settings, partly because that's (in some ways) the business Techdirt is in. However, for all the hype, most organizations experimenting with enterprise blogs are going about it the wrong way. They seem to think that all you need to do is give all your employees a blog, and watch the revolution begin. As state IT employees in Utah are discovering, it's not quite so easy. If you just want to give people blogs to write about whatever they want, why not just point them towards any of the free (or cheap) blogging systems out there, and let them go wild? If you're really talking about using a blog to increase worker productivity, better share knowledge, or better connect with partners/customers/co-workers, you need a bit more thinking involved. So many of the blog-boosters seem to believe that everyone wants to blog, and if given the opportunity to do so at work, they will blog useful work-related items. However, the example in Utah suggests the opposite (as does our own experience at Techdirt). Many people out there don't like to write. Many workers out there don't have time to input information. This is why knowledge management systems have a strong history of failing over and over again. It's not easy to get people to input knowledge. People who think that the world is going to change just by giving their employees some blogs are probably going to be very disappointed. Without some guidance, process, or plan the whole thing has a good chance of backfiring completely - leading people to wonder why they're letting their employees post images of themselves picking their noses. Blogs can be useful for personal uses and for work uses - but people need to understand their limitations as well. Here, we believe that there are a lot more readers out there than there are writers, and so our solution is to build internal corporate intelligence blogs for our customers. We fill it with the news and analysis, so they don't have to worry about the "knowledge" part of knowledge management. That doesn't mean I don't see solutions that involve giving employees blogs, but clearly, expectations need to be managed. While the case discussed in the article seems to be a bit misleading (some of the blogs in question appear to be quite good), even they admit that not many are jumping on the blog bandwagon. Blogging for the sake of blogging may be great for personal uses, but when it comes time to bring the blogs into a company, a better set of goals and plans are needed.