Intranet Blogging

For many years, traditional top-down knowledge management programs have failed to persuade employees to document their personal (tacit, hidden) knowledge into company-wide databases. The view of knowledge as something that can be "extracted" from employees is obsolete.

Knowledge is something that happens between people. It is a process, and requires conversation.

Creating personal spaces on the company intranet, where people can freely express their thoughts and insights, aligns with the bottom-up, conversational nature of knowledge creation.

Blogging has several characteristics that drive value creation:

Bottom-up.

Nobody forces you to blog. You can follow the stream of your thought processes, without having to conform to imposed regulations. As a result, what people write most naturally reflects their specific expertise and interests, allowing distortion-free expression of hidden knowledge.

Easy.

Publishing a blog post is hassle-free. The low-friction process encourages participation.

Linkable.

Bog entries and other intranet content can be hyperlinked, allowing easy exploration of relevant context.

Conversational.

People can comment on a blog entry, or respond with a blog entry of their own. All of these are recorded and shown underneath the blog entry, making it easy to start and follow conversations on any topic.

Tagging.

Assigning keywords to blog entries makes it easy to cluster and explore related subject areas.

Notifications.

People can subscribe to be notified of new publications by author or keyword interest, making it easy to stay up-to-date without having to check numerous sources.

Searchable.

Over time, the company blogosphere accumulates a treasure trove of knowledge gems, that can be found by a simple search query.

Authorship.

Because every blog entry links back to it's author, searching the company blogosphere allows employees to locate and contact colleagues that have specific expertise and experience.