I previously wrote on
the notion of knowledge-focused enterprises (make that: law firms)
using internal, behind-the-firewall blogs as tools for "doing" Knowledge
Management. For example, if your firm has one or two individuals
expert in §1031 tax-free exchanges, why shouldn’t they collaborate
on a blog reflecting their experiences with real transactions and their
dissection of the various issues that arise? After six months or
a year, your firm would have a valuable—and proprietary to you—knowledgebase
in, to my mind, a near-perfect format: By default, sorted chronologically
so that whenever "timeliness" is deemed important, it’s automatically
presented in that format; archived by category so that subtopics can
be immediately zeroed in on; and open to comment threads so that the
author’s first draft is not necessarily the last word, and ideas can
be refined through interchange. Even better, no one has to be trained
to create and maintain a blog; as a Sun Microsystems analyst observed,
"they’re like pencils and paper; people know what to do with them."
So what’s wrong with this picture? Sidestepping the question of
whether antediluvian attitudes might torpedo such an initiative before
it could start, the biggest question to date has been one not susceptible
to answering readily: To wit, is anyone actually doing it? And
what has been their experience?
Now we have at least one case
study. Analyzing the experience of an unidentified European pharmaceutical
company with 4,000 employees, operating in 20 countries, it tells the story
of that firm’s adoption and roll-out of six internal group blogs (150 bloggers
total, no individual blogs) based on the Traction
Software platform. Traction
was selected because it permits very fine-grained "permissions," as in
who can post to, comment upon, edit, and view which blogs. (For example,
although this is a bit unclear, it appears that Traction can make posts
to certain category "invisible" to certain users who otherwise have permission
to read the entire blog.)
Bottom line: A rousing success. "Compared with setting up
a similar project on a more traditional CMS or KM platform, the project
has been simpler, faster, more effective, and less expensive to
implement" (emphasis supplied).
Word to the wise: The roll-out of this project was exceedingly
thoughtful, including limiting it to a small group of self-selected evangelists
at first, generating positive word-of-mouth, and providing user-friendly
"daily digests" via email (than which nothing is more familiar, for better
or worse) to ease people gently into the blog construct.
Do
you hear the same intimations of the exhaustion of top-down, muscle-bound,
user-hostile Big IT that I do?
