enterprise weblogging: using weblogs for communication & information management

8/14/2019 Enterprise Weblogging: Using weblogs for communication & information management

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Lucent Technologies – Proprietary

Use pursuant to company instruction

Overview

1. Why weblogs?

3. What are they good for?

5. Roadmap



Definitions, just in case

I am assuming you know a little bit about weblogsDefinition of weblogs

– A journal, usually updated frequently, sometimes

categorized – Usually links to other sites

– Can support comments and some stateless interaction

– Provides an XML feed



Scope of this talk

YesI’m not talking about story

telling to the outsideworld

Some project information

can spill out into personalblogs; e.g. See Sun andMicrosoft blogs

Mainly internal project

weblogs

To some extent,personal information

management blogs whose goals are to buildindividual andorganizationalunderstanding

Not really





Why weblogs?



The elevator pitch

Can your employees see themselves in thecontext of the whole company? Would moreinformed decisions be made if employees andleaders had access to internal news sources?Weblogs serve this need.

By making internal websites simple to update,weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintainonline journals that chronicle projects inside thecompany. These professional journals make it easy

to produce and access internal news, providingcontext to the company — context that canprofoundly affect decision making. In this way,weblogs allow employees and leaders to make moreinformed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events. –LeeLefever



Knowledge workers - feel greatest need to publish &share – Researchers, engineers, sales force

Communities of Practice (CoPs) – need tocollaborate & share – Communities organized around projects, products or topics (e.g.

Mobility)

Chief Information Organization (CIO) – concernedabout standards – Enterprise Information Technology people

Executives – concerned about profitability,productivity, and cost savings – Officers, upper managers

The story is about people and their needs



1. Healthy information ecologies tend to be diverse – Diverse set set of user types

– Diverse set of needs

– Diverse set of technologies used to meet these needs

2. The need to publish and share is a commonproblem – it’s an organizational point of pain

– Obstacles to publishing right now

– Inflexibility of current tools

– Cost and limited human resources

Why they emerged



The new KM is a bottom-up effort – Using story-telling at a personal level to socialize information and

promote understanding – Shifting messaging power to the indidual

Weblogs support diverse ecologies

– They allow some interaction (commenting, remote comments viaXMLRPC-based trackbacks) – Enable information sharing (RSS/Atom feeds) – Keep control of publishing close to the owners

Weblog software arrives just in time

– The software is priced right and is easy to useDiversity is a good thing – See: Nardi, O’Day on information ecologies

Why they’re suitable for our current needs



Summary: What makes blogging a good fit



Lucent Technologies – ProprietaryUse pursuant to company instruction

Interesting, but what are they good for?



Personal and group informationmanagement

Typical communication and information sharingquestions related to projects:

– How do we minimize gaps in the individual's understanding of the knowledge of the larger group?

– How do we keep the group up to date on progress made byindividuals, by the team as a whole?

– How do we develop an organizational memory of processesleading to decisions?



The goal is to foster understanding.



Information management – Subject matter weblogs

– Document library weblog

– Training weblog

Project management – Training weblog (really a hybrid)

– Product requirements docs

Case studies at Lucent





Simple examples: Subject blogs



Conceptual model



How are needs satisfied by a weblog?



Site architecture

Published blog content Forms for posting content Instructionsfor posting

content viaweb or email



Home page schematic



Home page



Blog entry schematic



Blog entry





Tagging blog entries

Categorizing or tagging blog entries



Category and status tags

Status flagapplied whenquestion isanswered

Categoryapplied



Taking tagging further: Paragraph-levelflagging for Product Requirement Docs

Annotating atthe paragraphlevel. Example using

TractionSoftware forcollaborativeauthoring of aproductrequirementsdocument. Note



Low costEase of use

Features and functionalitymatch needs

– Distribution

– Archiving

– Interaction

Weblogs a good fit for this project



Roadmap: Where does the story end?



A roadmap for the long view



Now: Blogging software

Are individuals blogging already?What level of support can you provide?

Select solutions that match your information ecology – Centralized: Provide an enterprise blogging application

– Decentralized: Individuals and CoP’s select and manageown blog publishing application



Near term: Support information awareness

Bloggers very often use their own news readers totrack a lot of weblogs daily

Ability to stay abreast of internal/external news maydrive frequency of publishing

Consider electronic alerting services for vendor purchased news (e.g. ABI, Factiva) and internaldatabases (e.g. document repositories) as RSS





Example: RSS for all databases

RSS, HTML, JS feeds of database search results





Example: Social bookmarking

L S fi d bili f i l



Encourage bloggers to use full text feeds (with entireblog entry in the RSS feed)

Provide an enterprise RSS/Atom News reader for aggregation and archiving

– Off the shelf: Newsgator (Enterprise)

– Build your own or use open source software

Consider some classification of blog entries

Long term: Support findability of internalblogs



Longer term: Aggregating and classifying



Longer term: Enabling relationships



Relationships to entities in the enterprise

Observe relationships Enable expert finding and social behaviors



L T h l i P i

Thank you. [email protected]

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