InformationWeek reports on Wachovia's push to introduce social software into the enterprise.

Beyond connecting employees around the world, Wachovia's collaborative environment is designed to attract younger Generation Y employees who expect access to Web 2.0 tools at work. "Business in general has a real challenge engaging Generation Y," said Fields. "They're coming to us with high enthusiasm but encountering arcane tools and bureaucracies," he said, adding that many young workers' engagement levels "fall off the table" after about a year on the job. "They are leaving Fortune 100 companies," he said.

The company started by piloting wikis that represented "non-threatening use cases," and are expanding out from there. They will be building their set of tools based on Sharepoint services.

As younger knowledge workers enter the workplace and see the cumbersome legacy tools, or lack of tools, provided by some enterprises, they will clamor for the services they already use on the Internet and bitch about the inadequacy of what they have. I know I did when I worked in a large corporation.

Starting around 2000, with IM and then moving on the wikis, and social bookmarking, I got our group to bypass IT to install AIM and Usemod, and built our own social bookmarking tools. We learned to get things done better, faster, and smarter. I never asked for permission. I just did my job the best way I could.

There's no reason young information workers should need to ask for these tools now. You'd better just have them or we'll look outside to get them. But if you want to address issues such as security, it's better to heed the rumble from the grassroots.

The realization within the really large corporations like Wachovia to accept the new paradigm of doing business openly within the enterprise is a sign that the idea has taken root, and we shouldn't need to describe or document the need any longer. The tools are mature enough for IT consider in terms of security and journaling functionalities. Enterprise social software is slowly following in the wake of acceptance of the Cluetrain, and the paradigm of open markets and transparent communications with businesses. The timing is right and the tools are tested.

If I have any say in the matter, I won't ever work for another large company again. It took a lot of effort in evangelizing, socializing, and implementing tools for more efficient communications and documentation processes. But should I ever find myself back in a large corporation some day in the future, I'd wager that some form of the social software I use today will be present in those companies.

I gave a talk on enterprise weblogging for the New Jersey Chapter of the American Society of Information Science & Technology yesterday. The presentation is a distilled version of all of my past talks on the topic. I'm finding that I need to prune the actual power point file down more and more to use fewer slides, with more graphics and less text. What this is doing for me is allowing me more space to engage in conversation with the audience rather than to talk at them. This is the point of weblogs, and as I get more comfortable with public speaking this is becoming easier. This entire talk with punctuated with questions and sidebar discussions, which really helped add context to the presentation.

Here are a few of the interesting broader questions that were raised.

What makes weblogs a better choice over email discussion groups or team workspaces? Can weblogs be integrated with existing environments, like Lotus Notes, etc. (various forms of this question were asked)

I've thought about how to answer this question in the past presentations because it comes up. The answer I give is usually starts with the obvious one: ease of use, price, and syndication. They're easier to use for publishing than the tools we currently have (portal systems, content and document management systems), they're easy to install, and they're cheaper (inexpensive or free). I think that's the answer that drove the individual push to blog in the business world initially. But it's not the whole answer. The answer can also be found in how weblogs relate individuals to the company and relate the company to productivity, profitability by using these tools for knowledge sharing. Lee LeFever's "Weblog Pitch" provides the best summary of how weblogs do this. He says "It's about seeing yourself in the context of the company." It's about creating this context and understanding to make better decisions. As you may know from reading or attending my presentation, my long view for all of this is to extract and derive meaning in the relationships that are carved out of weblog use. Weblogs make this sort of extraction very simple because of what has evolved as a pattern for weblog format (blog entry, comment attached to email address or home page, trackbacks, XML feeds with subject fields) can be used for observation of relationships. These relationships can turn into other connections, expert finding, and that sort of thing.

The point people seem to be concerned about is a practical one. We do all of this sharing already in email discussion groups. We use Sharepoint. Why is this any better? My answer is yes, you can archive email discussion. Yes you can do some categorization in team areas. What weblogs offer (besides the cheap, fast and easy experience) is a different experience.

The weblog experience is often about me. I the publishing process. And by control I mean that usually an individual controls what she publishes, whereas an email discussion group is loose. It's based on we rather than me unless you're working with a multi-user weblog. But the experience also adds simple categorization, simple commenting mechanisms (including trackback) and a simple method for sharing and syndicating your output. This is the experience that's unique. The Wiki experience is similar, but with a we/community focus.

Both weblogs and wikis are enablers for grassroots efforts. And there is where the experience takes on meaning to the ecology. As we've seen in the past with Dan Rather at CBS, Jordan Eason at CNN, and George P. Nanos at LANL, weblogs have truly given a great deal of messaging power to individuals for better or for worse. This disruption to the power structures that makes them very interesting with regard to the media or to corporations. Viewed properly, it should be taken as an opportunity to harness the messaging power of the individual.

What should you do to motivate people to weblog?

I reiterated my belief that a healthy ecology depends on the freedom for individuals to express their needs. That is to say, I think that the urge to blog should be self-motivated and that when someone publishes because they feel the need to, they are more likely to sustain that publishing as long as the need exists. Self-motivation is ownership of the process. Requiring people to blog doesn't make sense. I can't believe that the process will be honest, conversational and open if the need doesn't arise organically.

At KM sessions I've been to, I've heard vendors suggest that motivation is the factor that will drive KM software success. To that point, the vendor suggested incentivising contribution by matching with monetary rewards. I think this is entirely wrong. One of the reasons we see weblogs having some success at being used for information and knowledge management today is because it represents the opposite view -- one that suggests that motivation to publish and share knowledge should be an individual matter and should be owned and controlled by the individual rather than mandated from above. Weblogs and wikis are a grassroots revolution, not a idea cooked up by management.

I gave a talk at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the use of weblogs for communication and information management. The talk incorporated components of several of the past presentations I've given on this topic. I covered these points:

1) why weblogs are emerging as a viable replacement for Knowledge Management software and as a supplement to an enterprise intranet portal

2) why weblogs are a good idea right now

3) what weblogs are being used for and how

4) strategy for dealing with weblog growth

5) ideas for sustaining use and measuring success.

A large part of my talk is focussed on case studies at Lucent, describing how we've used weblogs for communications, information sharing and knowledge management.

The LANL information ecology is similar in some ways to the Bell Labs ecology of years past. The CIO works at a high level on planning and funding and a decentralized system of IT organizations exists at LANL. It was great to see that the CIO works harmoniously with the diverse web-based systems that are developed and maintained by the individual organizations around LANL. This is exactly the environment that is perfectly suited to the emergence of weblogs. In my talk, I discuss at length the benefits of diverse "information ecologies" -- a concept taken from Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day's literature on the topic -- and how weblogs created out of bottom-up publishing efforts fit into this picture and provide a sensible, low-cost, high-value alternative to web publishing processes mandated from the top down. The concept of diversity as a key component to ecological health is validated in what has evolved at LANL.

A few people I spoke with at LANL stated that they are already considering using weblogs and wikis for some internal information management. Everyone in attendence of the conference was already aware of what weblogs are. The controversial public blog, "LANL: The Real Story" was more than likely the site that introduced many LANL staff to blogging.

While my talk emphasized the importance of weblogs as a publishing format, I also touched on some of the issues of giving messaging power to the masses because of its relevance to LANL. I pointed to the recent resignations of Jordan Eason at CNN and the demotion of Dan Rather at CBS following some mob-blogging related to statements made by each of these well-known public figures. The "LANL: The Real Story" blog was created to provide a public, uncensored forum for LANL staff to air their concerns and express their views about how the Labs were being run under director George P. Nanos. Nanos closed the Labs because of security concerns when classified tapes went missing. The report of missing tapes turned out to be a clerical error, but the shut downs cost the country an estimated $850 million. Last week, on May 6th, Director Nanos resigned. The story is covered in the New York Times.

These stories about the movement of messaging power away from centralized control to the masses is fascinating, controversial, and a bit unsettling. At some level, it is phenomenal that a technology can be disruptive enough to create a major shift in the control of power within a social system. Essentially, in the cases of Rather, Eason and Nanos, what we're viewing is the democratization of social systems and organizations, although some people would probably call the open criticism that's been appearing on blogs mob-rule. Blogging is surfacing controversial issues to stakeholders that probably would have been hidden in the past -- swept under the rug. In today's weblogging world, the statements and actions of important public figures can be challenged rather than accepted. In the cases mentioned above, when the statements or actions could not be successfully defended, the public image of the organization was affected to the extent that the organizations feared reprisal in the form of pulled financial backing.

I should mention that while I don't believe this power-shift to be a bad thing, there is, of course, potential for mobs to utilize blogs in malicious ways. The first step in dealing with controversial blogs should therefore be more communication, not less. In the case of Jordan Eason, whom I believe should not have resigned, CNN should have reacted immediately, blogging the issue on their own and allowing conversation to happen between CNN and the public. The lesson in all this is that we live in a world where people believe in democratic rule and in ideas around open communication (like those espoused in John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty"). The right reaction to these types of disruption is to react to it in kind with open debate and conversation. What these individuals and organizations could have done is used weblogging for their counter-message and as a platform for defending statements and actions rather than simply evading the issue. Has the lesson been learned by the media? We'll see the next time this happens.

But to return to the topic of my talk, which is not nearly as provocative as the talk of the Nanos resignation, there is clearly a lot of awareness of the power or blogs, not only as vehicles for unovering hidden issues, but also as a tool for information and project management. There are reports of blogs being used at LANL already, and many of the web developers in the audience had specific questions about how to select from the various technologies offered in the blog publishing space right now. Some individuals were interested in how we at Lucent are approaching the need to publish blogs. I communicated that my organization's role has mainly been to react to the needs expressed around blogging by providing consulting and developing strategies for dealing with weblog growth. I empasized that I believed in the decentralized approach to weblog implementation because such an approach allows content owners to retain control and decision making power related to their needs and the technologies they choose to fill them. That said, I also believe that a centralized solution may also be successful if well-conceived and flexible enough to allow content owners to control their data and the use of the blog.

I provided some ideas for dealing with weblog growth in the near and long term including the RSSification of enterprise databases and the creation of weblog RSS aggregation and archiving services. I also touched on the idea of integrating some of this output with other enterprise information systems and using applications that allow social behaviors. These ideas were outlined in the presentation I gave at Computers in Libraries, 2004.

The conference provided a good opportunity for me to connect with web developers in a community similar to ours at Bell Labs in the hopes of continuing to discuss how we use weblogs to meet key business needs in our respective organizations. As LANL staff move forward with their projects, we hope to share our experiences. Hopefully the outcome of our dialogue will result in best practices over time.

Fredrik Wackå posted an entry related to the rise of blog consultancies that are appearing in the marketplace. In "Internal Blogging More In Focus - Blog Consultants Beware", Wackå makes the following statement about the dangers of pushing for the introduction of corporate weblogs.

It's one thing to for example build a personal brand with blogging for an individual. It's an entirely different thing to try to change corporate culture, working methods and so on with blogging as one of many tools. Where a good writer and decent businessman can build a blog consultancy to do the first, it takes strategic organizational and communicative competence to do the other.

I'm going to go out on a limb and agree with him here, although I'm sure everyone in the professional blogging consultancy market will disagree. Fredrik's point here, I think, is that weblogging is not just a technology that's introduced into the information ecology. There are aspects about weblog publishing that are directly related to how one views there place in the company and its culture. The point is well made in a comment left by Agile:

My experience is that corporate employees exhibit risk-averse behaviour in word and deed. In spite of the fact that the upper management will exhort iniative and outspokenness amongst staff. Because middle management will in turn punish such behaviour severely. Everybody knows that. So internal blogging will equally be a very sanitized version of what could and should be said.

Corporate blogs are effective and relevant when they're organically created out of a need to share from the grassroots, and not merely from a mandate chucked down from the C levels. It is, however, important to have the support of higher-ups for a weblogging culture to emerge. His point about lower-level employees avoiding the risk of stirring the waters or inviting criticism sounds acutely attuned to the type of behavior that tends to exist in large corporations. Because of lack of support or fear of reprisal for openness, people may tend to do as little as possible to keep their job and as much as possible to maintain the status quo. If the status quo has not included openly sharing/publishing information, then the shift to blogging will be pretty significant.

I'll reiterate again a point I made in past presentations about the importance of diversity and decentralization in the information ecology. For blogging to be useful, it has to grow out of one's own expressed needs to share. This keeps ownership close to the blogger and makes the probability of sustainability and success greater. I don't think you can effectively incentivize blogging from above. You can create policy to support an open environment for communication. You can create a technology platform to ease people into the tools to publish. But the real incentives to publish what one knows must come from the author. For the blog author to communicate genuinely and directly, they have to be willing and able to do so. This is the tipping point you are looking for. When the culture exists to allow people to feel comfortable to blog, probability exists that blogging may succeed in the company. If a consultant sells you on a technology platform, but fails to discuss users, the ecology of prospective corporate bloggers and their culture, they're selling you snake oil. The only up side to buying into a technology such as weblogging without having these discussions, however, is that you won't have to pay the huge pricetags that we saw with KM packages in the last 5 years.

I'm saying all of this above because I think the emergence of the business blogging industry is very much directed by the writing of those who are keenly attuned to the possibilities afforded to companies by this format. On the buying side, there are many high level management folks within companies that are buying the "blogs will help your company" sales pitches. But consultancies and prospective corporate customers should be aware that in your needs assessment and discovery process, the aspect of culture cannot be overlooked. Otherwise, all we are doing is packaging corporate messages, rather than allowing true conversations (in the spirit of the ClueTrain) to emerge.

I'm speaking at the IQPC Corporate Weblog and Wiki Summit, which is being held February 1 - 2, 2005 at The Miami Intercontinental Hotel, Miami, FL. The presentation will be talking a bit about utilizing weblogs for project efficiency and will cover projects I've worked on in the past year. The case studies will discuss briefly the process for designing and implementing weblogs for communication and document dissemination within a well defined community.

I don't plan on reiterating too much of what I presented on last year at the CiL conference. What I hope to do this time is to start out by touching on the "whats" and "whys" for using weblogs for grassroots publishing and then show through case studies why weblog software was chosen as the platform for 2 of the projects I discuss and briefly go over how they were implemented. In closing I hope to touch on some of the issues that may be encountered when embarking on these types of projects and begin to develop some best practices for bringing weblog projects from the evangelization and discovery phase to implementation.

If we're acquainted and you're interested in attending the conference, please contact me to let me know. .

Alex, a colleague of mine in Germany, pointed out that I am cited in an article in German journal Computer Zeitung that discusses corporate weblogs. Alex summarized it for me:

The article explains how weblogs could optimize knowledge management and project management, and notes that weblogs are getting recognized by IT professionals. Some points made in the article:

* Knowledge Management tools are great but expensive - weblogs are doing the same for less money
* Upper managment will be happy, as the software is inexpensive and easy to install
* The third paragraph explains what Moreover is doing
* The fourth paragraph is talking about Groove Networks and says that even big publishers use weblogs as efficient communication tools and see a bright future for this kind of inline publishing. They recommend that every publisher should focus on integrating weblogs in their online publications.

I recently had an email exchange with someone asking if knowledge sharing is possible where I work. Their position was that the culture doesn't support it, so it has little chance of happening at an organizational level. I agree, of course, that culture plays an enormous part in knowledge sharing. If you look at a large company from the top-down, and there is a legacy of bureaucracy, political control over information may be a big barrier to the development of a knowledge culture. In an environment like this, it's not surprising that people might tend to hoard rather than share. Having experienced multiple waves of layoffs, many people may view KM efforts as the knowledge extraction process that occurs before the knowledge pods are excised from the main vessel. But the view from the ground up, where knowledge work happens -- the kind of work that is closest to the company's product -- is that the need to create and share knowledge exists despite the politicized environment and bureaucratic culture. So how does it have a chance of evolving and surviving in this hostile environment?

From my perspective as a librarian, knowledge management has traditionally had to do with the process of information provision (knowledge representation for information retrieval) and supporting the process that evolves from information gathering and synthesis into knowledge creation on a personal (single customer) or group level. What I've recently observed and have been a part of, is the grass roots effort to manage personal knowledge. The need for people to acquire and control knowledge within their small communities persists and some people have felt the need to use an array of tools including weblogs, wikis or discussion groups rather than centralized CMS or KM systems. What's different with weblogs, wikis, discussion groups, IM, etc. where people connect on a personal level is that they do so without having to route themselves through a process or system that was created by upper management without looking into what people actually need or how they work. They do so because they need to and because without the interference of a CIO or management-chosen system, they can control the knowledge creation and flow. The difference in tools such as self-installed weblogs/wikis is that because they're closely held and controlled, they may have a better chance of being used and sustained by the people who need them. They may also die when they're no longer needed. This should be natural, if you take the view of the company as an information ecology. With this grass-roots scenario, the need, use and evoution is organic. The output is produced of and by the people having the needs.

So, given that this kind of knowledge management effort still has the audacity to arise in a hostile environment, does this mean that knowledge management has a chance in a place where the culture doesn't seem to get it from the top? I would say yes, if you believe that acting locally has an impact globally. Change from the grass roots might be more effective and have a better chance of sustainability. Of course, it would help to have key influential motivators that can make the new KM meme viral within the organization -- to lead by example. Knowledge management is most effective on a person to person level, where people share knowledge directly, making the tacit explicit in conversation. These tools reflect that type of inter-personal communication and are possibly better suited for KM because of that. It is this view that keeps me interested in designing information systems that support knowledge creation in the company.