Blogs for business?
Strip away the hype, and find a newly useful tool for communication
Howard Baldwin -- EDN, January 1, 2005
Forget about all the hype you've heard about blogs (a.k.a. Web logs) as the latest outlet for personal journalism. It turns out they also have a remarkable ability to aid communication in business, whether within internal workgroups or among external chains of suppliers and partners. For an industry such as electronics—where relationships are far-flung and time-to-market pressures require fast communications—blogs can bring a new agility to the workforce.
The hullabaloo surrounding the blog has obscured what it is. It's not complex—it's simply a Web site that lets its owner (and anyone to whom that owner gives permission) post comments, links to other Web sites and documents, all without being proficient in HTML. Imagine opening a browser window and being able to access e-mail, presentations and spreadsheets relating to a project, all in one place. Like any other Web site, it can be password-protected. The developers of blogging software, which costs between $40 and $200, according to sources, are so obscure you probably haven't even heard of them.
"It's very much like the Internet itself," says Phil Gomes, a PR professional in the electronics industry who lectures frequently on the benefits of blogs. "One person links to another, who links to another." Indeed, Gomes suggests, blogs work best internally as a knowledge management tool, because information can be made so easily accessible.
On a semantic note, what we're really describing here is a wiki, not a blog. From the Hawaiian word for fast, a wiki is generally considered to be a collaborative effort, whereas a blog is more personal. However, blog is becoming the more all-encompassing term, so we'll use that.
Early adopters note that internally focused blogs are best characterized by simplicity and specificity. Eric Paulos is a research scientist for Intel who helped set up a series of internal blogs to bring together the employees at labs in Berkeley; Seattle; and Cambridge, England. "We thought using blogs and wikis would be a good way to collaborate and keep an open atmosphere," he says. "The goal was to have a mechanism through which people could interact."
"It gives our people a chance to participate in the tribes and communities that are part of our business."
—Andy Lark, Sun Microsystems
At one point, there were eight blogs within Intel Research, ranging in content from personal information to reports on conferences and meetings. Paulos, who studies urban computing issues, hoped to generate some cross-pollination. "If someone was doing something with mobile phone software and someone else was working on planetary-scale computing, we could informally put things in the blog, referring people to other links and recommending sources," he says.
As an experiment, it was fun. As an ongoing effort, it wasn't as successful, however. "It wasn't part of daily work practice to look at the blogs, and they looked like a public bulletin board," Paulos says. "It's hard to have a group blog. They need some ownership." Today, Paulos' colleagues at Intel Research still use blogs, but in a more focused way.
Besides having potential as knowledge management tools, blogs are used in several companies for external communications. Among the companies are Sun Microsystems, whose CEO Jonathan Schwartz famously blogs, along with more than a dozen other Sun employees ( www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/blogs), and Microsoft, whose highly accessible technical evangelist Robert Scoble "has done more to humanize Microsoft than any marketing program yet conceived," says Gomes.
But everyone who posts from a company, even if there's a disclaimer on their blog saying their opinions are their own, has to maintain some common sense. "Even on my own blog, I'm not protected by the First Amendment," says Andy Lark, Sun Microsystems vice president of corporate communications. "I'm governed by Sarbanes-Oxley." In that respect, blogs are no different from e-mail or instant messaging in terms of rules of engagement—no offensive content or dissemination of proprietary information is allowed on a public site. "Just as with e-mail and instant messaging," warns Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute, "you have to follow what we call the three e's: establish a policy, educate your employees about it and enforce it."
Still, proponents proclaim that blogs have their advantages. "If I were bringing a product to market today," notes Rob Rodin, a venture capitalist whose avocations include studying the utility of the Internet, "I would definitely consider building a blog to generate dialogue about the product, so I could keep a bird's-eye view of what people are saying about it." In addition, beta testers could post problems on a blog and bring them to light sooner, and the blog could also quickly disseminate the solution.
For Sun's Lark, this two-way communication is a key advantage for engineers, working on something as focused as running Java on medical devices, who want to talk to other developers and designers. "You get a lot of insight into how real people think about what we're doing, but it also gives engineers a voice in the market they didn't have before." For instance, with the release of Solaris 10—essentially Sun's open source version of its operating system—Sun's OS developers have been able to respond to concerns from application developers with swift and unfiltered access. Lark adds, "It gives our people a chance to participate in the tribes and communities that are part of our business."
