Computerworld editor Linda Rosencrance provides an in-depth look at how weblogs are emerging as a business tool. The feature highlights Socialtext Workspace customer and defense contractor Soar Technology:
Jacob Crossman, a software engineer at Soar Technology Inc. in Ann Arbor, Mich., uses blogging tools from Palo Alto, Calif.-based Socialtext Inc. to keep an up-to-date engineering notebook on his ideas about a particular project that can be accessed by other project participants.
"One of the disadvantages of a paper-based engineering notebook is that it's hard to find things unless you want to go through it manually," Crossman says. "So I decided to use the blog feature of Socialtext's software to keep track of my ideas. I would type them in, and then they're immediately searchable using another feature of the software." He is also able to link to other documents about the project using the blog entry.
Crossman is not alone. Recently, weblogs, or blogs, which let anyone with a Web browser and some easy-to-use software publish a personalized diary online, have started to emerge as valuable knowledge management and communication tools in companies.
But blogs aren't entering through the CIO's office. They often first appear in companies as the convenient records of engineering or design projects. They're taking the same bottom-up adoption path followed by instant messaging, another collaboration tool originally used for personal communication.
The article also quotes me on the prevalent adoption pattern of business blogging and how vendors need to offer a granular path of use that shares risk:
"The trend that's happening now is that users are seeing the need for blogging like they have with other disruptive technologies, and they're bringing them into the enterprise at the workgroup or departmental level," says Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext.
Mayfield says the adoption scenario begins when a single worker sets up a work space for his workgroup. The group then goes on to build a business case for how blogging is adding value just on that small scale. "Then that person creates a work space with somebody who's in a different workgroup, and gradually what ends up happening is you gain this critical mass of building business case after business case within an organization," he says. "And by the time the CIO is really looking at the technology to make a top-down buying decision for the enterprise, they already have an existing class of business cases and proven techniques of how users are adopting it."
Mayfield says because these blogging tools are inexpensive -- approximately $30 per user per month -- easy to use and accessible, there's the potential for growth within the enterprise similar to the growth of instant messaging.
"I would expect it to be the same way, where users are just going to have it first, and then managers are going to realize increasingly the value of it as a management tool," Mayfield says.
Weblogs are simple solution for project communication and facilitating open conversations that reduce project cycle times and project risk. Sometimes customers are concerned about the benefits of open conversation, but these issues have already been addressed by previous generations of communication technology. Email, for example, emerged from the bottom-up as a tool for line workers. Managers were concerned about how lateral communication patterns could impact authority. These concerns proved largely unfounded. In less than ten years, managers have become the dominant users of email.
What's different about email and email augmented by a Socialtext Workspace is the capability to hold some of these conversations openly to reduce occupational spam (abusive CCs) and generate a group memory.
The article goes further to describe how social software differs from traditional collaboration:
Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, agrees that blogs are good for ongoing communications about a particular project within a company as well as with clients. Blogs are less complicated to use and less formal than collaboration suites and electronic meeting rooms.
"Companies use blogs for the conversation that occurs between team members," Mayfield says. "What's been missing is a tool to support that same lightweight communication or that simple communication that occurs, i.e., 'We're a little bit ahead of schedule,' or 'I'm running into a barrier in completing this certain task, and does anyone know where I can find that information?' It's easy for companies to create status update messages -- one for internal use and one for external use."
It should be said that while weblogs are great tools for communication and publishing, they are not suitable for collaboration. Getting things done together can be facilitated by another lightweight web-native tool, a wiki. At Socialtext, we recognize the promise of weblogs in the enterprise that is being demonstrated from the bottom-up. But we also recognize the inherent limitations of blogs and how they need to be extended with other tools to enhance productivity.