Internet Time Blog: Knowledge blogs are tough. Quote: "i've had similar experiences in my more limited attempts to evangelize blogging in a work environment. it's a real eye-opener that will level-set any delusions that blogging will revolutionize knowledge sharing in organizations. it takes alot of persistence and i heartily 'second' his recommendations. while rick gives his own co-workers the benefit of the doubt, in many ways, the lessons are no different that those learned in more traditional knowledge management arenas. you can lower the barriers to entry to near-zero and find that most people simply don't want to share for all the usual mundane, institutionalized reasons." [Serious Instructional Technology]
I have not been able to find the link but the quote is telling. Whether blogs work depends very much on the manner by which the company is organized. A command-and-control hierarchical company will not have employees who generally want to share. In this company, knowledge is power. Those that make knowledge scarce are those with greater power. People at each level only know the small picture, ensuring that those at the top are the only ones who know everything, thus justifying their HUGE salaries. It really would cripple the company if they left. Why in the world would anyone blog here? You do not advance in the hierarchy if you make your work transparent.
I worked at a company with a different model, at least in research. There was a narrow hierarchy, everyone at any level was free to participate in project meetings, quarterly project reviews, etc. Instead of a vertical silo for information to flow, it was an adaptive network, built to solve problems. It was extremely powerful because knowledge creation was very rapid and was dispersed very quickly throughout the network. For two people in different departments to learn anything in a strict hierarchy, the knowledge must move up to the appropriate higher level manager then back down. This is many more steps than a well-connected network has. In many cases, such a network will be able to make decisions better and faster than a hierarchy. In a field, like biotechnology, that changes rapidly this is a huge competitive advantage.
At a company such as this, a blog would work well, particularly when combined with a news aggregator, such as in Radio. An example: One of the most difficult things for scientists to do these days is stay current with the literature. There are so many articles being published. No one has the time to browse the new journals each week. Online journals are worse because they are no longer limited by paper prices and can publish more articles, more often. But, a news feed can be created for each on-line journal. The news aggregator can go out and find the new articles when they are published. This saves time since the scientist no longer needs to go out to each site themselves. Then, the scientist, after scanning the new papers, can post to his weblog any that look interesting. This allows him to easily bookmark these and get back to them later, when they will have more time to actually read all of the article. Finally, for the important articles, the scientist can add commentary to clarify any positive or negative aspects of the paper.
Now, if other scientists subscribe to the newsfeed of the first scientist, they can find out about useful articles WITHOUT having to do all the looking themselves. In fact, if the first scientist has a reputation for being the first to find useful new articles, people will subscribe to the feed simply because what the scientist adds. In this example, you save a lot of repeated effort. Instead of every scientist reading every journal on immunology, for example, a small group can examine each journal and post the useful articles for the others. In a adaptive network, knowledge can be created and dispersed extremely fast using such a system.
This sort of filtering worked all the time at Immunex, even before Radio. There were some scientists who were excellent at getting just the right new paper in front of people who needed to see it. In fact, these scientists got a real thrill at matching the right paper with the right scientist. As Immunex got larger, it became more difficult for them to do this. Radio allowed them to do it again. And it is a virtuous cycle. Those that do a good job finding and posting knowledge would have more people subscribing to them.
But, the corporate structure already supported this and had already selected for people that wanted to collaborate. Those people who wanted to hoard information did not last long at Immunex. So, something like Radio would work really well there. In fact, I was testing it there before I left and I think it would have been a big hit. I am not so sure it would work at someplace like GE. 11:28:40 PM
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