Seven Reasons for Your Company to Start an Internal Blog

Proponents say an in-house blog can be like a bulletin board, communication tool and culture enhancement. Plus, it's better than tracking projects by e-mail.

June 20, 2007 — CIO — If your existing e-mail system makes it nearly impossible to find what you need or effectively manage many documents, you might be ready for enterprise blogging on your corporate intranet, according to analysts and vendors at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here are seven signs that you might be ready:

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1. Your enterprise e-mail applications are not easy to search. This prevents people from getting key information that might be buried in a colleague’s inbox. Even recent improvements and offerings in enterprise search might not allow you to get critical pieces of information you need from an e-mail that someone failed to include you as a recipient in. “KM [Knowledge Management] fails often because the benefit was for the company, not the individual,” says Suw Charman, a blog consultant. “Wouldn’t it just be easy to keep information about one subject in one place—a blog?”

2. Your e-mail is lost in the eye of the “cc storm.” With e-mail, information sharing is haphazard, disorganized. The information that gets passed along to anyone largely relies on the prerogative of the sender. Did he put you in the “to” or “cc” (carbon copy) field or the politically charged “bc” (for blind copy)? Sometimes, people merely forget to include key players, or worse, sometimes the omission is intentional (see more about e-mail cattiness below, under the section on openness and accountability). “If there is information in a cc storm and you’re not on it, then you don’t have any idea about what’s going on,” says Chris Alden, executive vice president with Six Apart, an enterprise blogging vendor. With blogs, information about specific topics lives on the intranet, and critical information can be broadcasted to all who want to see it and who have permission to see it.

3. Ex-employees can take it with them. When someone leaves, odds are the e-mail account becomes dissolved and all the valuable information that lived in that person’s account disappears into a data wasteland. “It’s forever lost,” says Anil Dash, chief evangelist for Six Apart. “If it’s in a blog, it doesn’t disappear when that person leaves.”

4. Too much wasted time checking in with colleagues. If you know the movie Office Space, think of Lumbergh pestering his direct report—about nothing much of import, with a recurring, “Hello, Peter, what’s happening?” It’s a truism that people waste a ton of time “checking in” with one another either in person, via e-mail or phone. A blog provides a method of logging that information without the cumbersome process of constantly sending “what have you been working on lately” types of e-mails. If your boss or direct report reads your blog, he already knows.