Empowering the knowledge worker – The power of Enterprise Blogs.

There was a time when content management was an expensive solution and publishing regular updates was an option available only to websites willing to invest in an expensive CMS. Enter blogs, and today, the power to publish is in the hands of everybody (including nobodies like me.) It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to manage content (or ‘microcontent’ as people like to call it) on your site with such ease and at the same time have access to an online repository of all your thoughts and findings. If you have been keeping a blog, sooner or later you’ll find yourself checking your own archives for that nice tidbit you posted a few months back, but can’t summon up anymore.

There have been a number of developments in the blogging scene. Pyra Labs was bought by Google and Sixapart have found some serious money coming their way via Neoteny. Does this mean that blogging is going to be next big wave? Or is this going to be the start of a ‘blog bubble’? Nothing can be said for sure but there definitely is a great potential that exists here. One of the most promising opportunities I see is the arrival of a new breed of blogs – The Enterprise Blog.

Imagine giving knowledge workers/domain experts within an organization the ability to publish their know-how without actually having any web-publishing know-how! And consequently imagine another employee within the organization with the need for the particular piece of information actually being able to retrieve the information without even having to get in touch with the domain expert. What is more important though, is the fact that the knowledge remains within the enterprise, even if knowledge worker does not.

Apart from being an enterprise knowledge repository, I’ve seen a number of software evangelists use blogs (Macromedia and Microsoft being amongst them.) Guy Kawasaki would probably would have really loved it if MacWorld was a blog (is it?)

And finally there is an ocean of personal blogs on the net that may contain information that is very relevant to an enterprise, and thus giving them the ability to leverage knowledge and talent from outside the enterprise, at little or no cost!

Whatever the motivation, it does make sense for enterprises to leverage blogging as a productivity tool or a supplement to their existing IS infrastructure. As to how exactly these tools will be adopted by enterprises remain to be seen.

Meanwhile, I really see an opportunity here to come up with some interesting Flash based visualization that will help analyze linkages and even geographical distribution of knowledge (a la ‘world as a blog’.)

Here are some related readings:
Emergic
Padwan
IT-director - via Emergic
John Lawlor on Business Blogging
Jon Udell - The conversational Enterprise
Jon Udell - Publishing a project Weblog
Jumping the corporate blog wagon
Sacramento Bee
Man gets sacked for blogging

Posted by Navneet at May 1, 2003 07:06 PM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam