Charged with addressing these communication bottlenecks and fostering a culture of open communication, Assistant Director of Corporate Communication Andrea Austin found an answer in the form of corporate blogging: This promised to put information out in the open, where anyone could find it.

The problem with e-mail, according to Austin, is one of reach: "You may be aware of only some subset of people that may have an interest in what you’re working on," she notes. Sharing information via a blog brings those people back into the loop. "You’re not determining and limiting who your potential audience may be," she adds.

Not just any blogging application would do, however. Because Northwestern Mutual is part of a highly regulated industry, it must be ready to produce a complete record of all communications at any time. The company chose iUpload’s Customer Conversation System, because it combines Web-based blogging and content management with enterprise security, workflow and regulatory compliance tools. Northwestern especially liked its extensive versioning capabilities.

"We need to be able to document at any point in time that we know exactly what content has appeared in anything that we produce," says Austin. "We couldn’t have moved forward with this application if it did not have that capability."

Moving forward was also easy because iUpload dovetailed with Northwestern Mutual’s existing user authentication software to ensure a single sign-on process for users. Finally, because the blogs are externally hosted on iUpload’s servers, IT gains flexibility and can free up resources to work on other projects, as opposed to managing blogs on the company’s own hardware, Austin says.

The costs of a blogging tool like this one don’t even compare to those of traditional KM systems, which easily run into the millions; iUpload Customer Conversation System Enterprise Edition starts at $1,500 per month for 100 users. (Smaller groups can get going with iUpload Express Edition, which starts at $250 per month for 10 users.)

Northwestern Mutual’s experience echoes the larger trend among KM 2.0 apps: A business unit sought out a tool to solve a specific, tactical KM problem, in this case, opening up communications (as opposed to establishing a formal, overarching KM program). Northwestern’s IT department helped the business unit users navigate the technical choices and select iUpload among several blogging tools. Both users and IT liked the solution to the tactical problem. This scenario is a long way from the old model for KM, where users often were unilaterally presented with a complex KM system by IT.