General Electric recently touted it 'corporate cockpit' of key business metrics -- viewable by only 45 executives across the company. But a $125 billion company with 300,000 employees can scarcely turn on a dime with that degree of information hoarding.
Employees are the early warning systems of business change.... Weblogs capture and cultivate knowledge, opinion, news about customers, technology, and markets.
Teams: Encourage Weblogs of evolving ideas. To harness internal expertise, firms should encourage employees to link their ideas to external supporting evidence using weblogs. For example, an engineering team at Motorola can bolster internal R&D thinking with outside expertise -- like Glenn Fleishman's Weblog on 802.11b standard for personal wireless technology.
The person-to-person connections enabled by IM, shared workspaces, and weblogging confound published system-based communication paths -- like approval processes, lead routing, and technical problem escalation. The result is a behavior change at every level. Executives must accept that the best information may pop-up in the virtual hallway.
Recommended vendors: Groove, Jabber, and UserLand
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