I have been asked by several people recently “What is a Wiki?”. While there are some great examples and references out there, a recent article from Forbes provides a good background and good support for the use of Wiki’s.
If you want to find a Wiki, check out Wiki Engines where there is a wiki for just about every platform.
Over the last few days blogger has been playing up. Not sure if you are all seeing the impact, it seems this morning things have got back to normal.
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For all you SAP heads out there if you did not get to TechEd this year, or even if you did go, you can now purchase DVD’s of the events via the SAP Developer Network.
On other SAP related items each time I visit SDN I find all sorts of interesting pieces of information. Such as their White Paper on Portal Cockpit covering portals, KM, collaboration etc. While very SAP centric it would give any organisation some good ideas on what they can be aiming for.
On another note, yes I know there is a typo in a post a couple of days ago, but I just can’t bring myself to fix it that is what was published so it should stay. I will just need to be more careful. 🙂
Adrian O’Leary pointed to me to an interesting article from Fast Company in April. Where there is a poll on the potential for businesses for blogs, results are interesting showing a fairly even split over knowledge management, project management, sales & marketing, and competitive intelligence. Ok, maybe only 1000 votes but still an interesting breakdown.
The results show a massive potential in many different areas of the business for the introduction of internal blogs to businesses.
Via Enterprise RSS.
Charlene Li talks about Razorfish using blogs and other social tools for internal collaboration and knowledge management. Interesting post. Charlene wonders if such an arrangement displaces traditional KM systems? I would say yes it will!
Blogs are about opening up conversations with people, as we have seen recently with Scoble. By opening up conversation you are sharing, and this create a shared knowledge. Which I believe is the bottom line when it comes to KM (others will disagree). If we look back over the last 10,000 years societies before us had very good methods of knowledge management, sharing.
Blogs, Wikis, RSS and other similar tools provide a direct, open, transparent, timely and personal means of communication. When we overlay the current search technologies we have a fantastic method of managing our knowledge, whether internal or external it can be managed. Entries in there tools can be categorised, searched, indexed, commented on and developed further.
I am interested in Forrester’s vision of the future when an employee joins an organisation. I would love to see further bits added to this, but right now most organisation struggle to have a desk, computer and phone when a new employee arrives. I will just wait until we have all learnt how to crawl with respect to day one triggers before I get too ahead of myself.
Just listened to Phil Becker being interviews by Doug Kaye over at IT Conversation. Phil is one of (maybe the) organisers of the Digital ID World conference that was recently held in Denver this year.
I am finding myself more and more interested in the whole area of digital identity, I have mentioned single sign on (SSO) several times here as I thought it was important and the HRIS industry has been talking about it for a LONG time, same with the regular IT industry. I am only now beginning to understand really what is required.
Phil spoke about a presentation from Tony Scott, CTO General Motors and GM’s experiences in developing a global phone book for their employees. The project took 1 year to complete, the technological portion about 2-3 months. The cultural, political and legislative took 1 year. GM learnt how they had to deal with the incompatibility between the different privacy attitudes/legislation environments around the globe. Having been through this in the late 90’s at Nortel Networks, working on single instance (physically in the US) global SAP HR roll out, I can fully appreciate the issues they had to face. These issues of privacy and cultural differences are going to be some of the biggest issues faced by digital identity.
Phil also spoke about trust and how critical this is for digital identity to succeed, but also recognises that technology cannot generate trust. Trust is probably the biggest change issues faced when deploying workforce applications. When you start placing employee payslips online, processing performance reviews, salary changes, IR action etc the employee’s trust in the integrity of the system is paramount. So often I have seen very successful (up until deployment) projects damaged by a poor roll out and change program.
So how do you create trust? Personally I feel you create trust over a period of the meeting (or exceeding) expectations of your customers. Phil confirmed this during the interview.
Just been listening to G’Day World and found the Aussie Slang section one of the best things I have heard in a while. Being an aussie who has worked in Canada & the USA trying to explain some of our slang and terminology, eg bugger, bastard, cobber etc, it is great to hear Cameron and Mick explaining it to the world.
I have been following the links reading the posts and feel very humbled and kind of like “a fish out of water” being involved in the BlogosphereRadio special report. To have been involved in something with so many important people within blogosphere is just amazing.
With all of the talk about what seems external corporate blogging I thought I might reflect on internal corporate blogging. I guess kind of like Jeremy Wright did a couple of days ago of business blogging overall.
It seems that most of the commentary to date (that I have seen at least) seems to have been driven by the PR and marketing types, when most bloggers seem to be neither. While thinking I was wondering what does it take to get blogging to begin within an organisation, sort of what is the catalyst, as this is my area of interest. Then I remembered a statement the Guy Kawasaki made in Rules for Revolutionaries, which I have just finished reading again, on creating virtual communities.
Guy provides 5 points while very relevant to external corporate blogging I think are just as relevant to the internal side.
I feel it is very important for all organisations looking at blogging as a form of communication to begin the process from the correct point of view. By this I mean not to try and use blogging to cover holes in their management practices, a company with poor management practices might just pay lip service to the whole process and in the end the process will fail. Either your customers or employees will see through the rhetoric. Therefore if you are going to start make sure you begin for the right reasons.
Internal blogging can be a very good method of developing employee engagement, by engagement I am talking about capturing the hearts and minds of employees. You create engagement through involvement, listening and understanding all of which can be developed through an internal blog.
Michael Specht 