Weblogs en wikis binnen bedrijven

Al eerder heb ik hier ruim aandacht besteed aan het gebruik van weblogs
en wikis in bedrijven. Een overzicht van interessante artikelen over
dit onderwerp is te vinden via The best of Frankwatching (kijk bijvoorbeeld onder het kopje Intranet, kennismanagement en innovatie). In The Gilbane Report (volume 12, nummer 10, maart 2005) vond ik het verhaal Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications? Hier een opsomming van de – wat mij betreft – belangrijkste citaten uit dit verhaal.

• The striking thing about blogging systems is how easy the blogs are to
  update, removing most or all of the pain of writing HTML pages. Even
  relative newcomers to technology find adding information to a blog
  (once the system has been installed and configured) easier than
  creating a word processing document. And it is far easier than adding
  information to many content management systems, though also far less
  powerful.
• The most obvious use of blogs in the corporate world is where an
  employee of a company writes their thoughts on issues, just like with
  the traditional personal blog, but with the added twist that they also
  write about their work and the company they work for. The Economist wrote
  about Robert Scoble of Microsoft in their February 10, 2005 issue,
  heralding the death of traditional PR and calling him a celebrity
  blogger. There are other companies where the CEO or President writes
  blogs to explain their thinking to the world, and I expect the trend to
  continue. Companies have realized that they need to explain what they
  do to the world, and they also need a forum to find out what their
  customers, partners, and investors think. Blogs provide this forum; at
  the recent Northern Voice
  blogging conference the keynote speakers Tim Bray and Robert Scoble
  both talked about the increased listening power that blogs bring. The
  flip side to this, of course, is that people who write in response to a
  blog posting expect to be listened to, and they are very quick to pick
  up on inauthentic, exaggerated, or dismissive responses.
• Wikis are also useful for providing information and gathering feedback.
  The “tips and tricks” noted above could also be kept in a
  wiki, where they would be edited not by one engineer but by a group of
  people, which could include the public. Unlike blogs, wikis are
  designed for repeated editing of a set of documents, making them more
  suitable if the document is expected to have a longer life and should
  be easy to find throughout its life cycle. As an example, Microsoft
  uses wikis to gather customer input and ideas.
• Many companies use blogs and wikis internally for a variety of
  uses. This is where the different feature sets of different systems
  start to become more important. The outward-facing uses of blogs
  typically need few features whereas using blogs or wikis internally
  (whether on an intranet or extranet) often requires a different feature
  set. We’ll see why as I go through some examples of use.
• Probably the easiest example of using a blog
  within a company is as a company notice board. Whether the published
  item is about the office party, an interesting link, or the latest
  sales success, a blog can help keep people informed of the small items
  that make a company’s culture more vital. Telecommuters can keep up to
  date as well as part-time workers or frequent travelers. The blog helps
  cut down on email traffic and nobody is inadvertently left off the
  mailing list.
• The trend in commercial products is towards combined systems that have
  features from both blogging systems and wikis as well as full audit
  trails and version control. What is noteworthy about these systems is
  that they are using the functionality developed for personal online
  diaries and turning them into systems for information sharing where the
  individual voice and personality is less important than the information
  that is being imparted. This is where blogs shift focus from the
  sometimes hubristic to the collaborative, from the individual to the
  group. And thus many other types of systems that work to support
  collaborative efforts are looking to add blogging or wiki-like
  capabilities, forming hybrid systems. I foresee this trend continuing,
  and that just as content management systems now are expected to provide
  ways to take advantage of XML documents, so will enterprise systems be
  expected to provide blog-like capabilities and/or RSS feeds.
• Currently much information flows via email. This leads to a
  number of problems, including the difficulty of “occupational spam”
  where people are copied on email messages they don’t need to read, and
  the missing email where people are left off the list that do need to
  read it. (…) Over-eager spam filters (including a
  human who is overwhelmed and clicks the delete button too quickly) are
  a big problem, as is the problem of simply missing a message in the
  hundreds that people receive each day. Having centralized information
  sources with RSS feeds solves this problem. The reader subscribes to
  what they want to subscribe to (or, as befits the enterprise context,
  what they are allowed or required to subscribe to) and is automatically
  notified of new content. RSS readers can download all the updates to
  the local machine for offline reading, just as for email. And spam is
  taken care of at the content provider end, not the reader end. A
  further advantage is saving time. It is much easier and quicker to read
  an RSS feed from 50 projects than to go to the websites of even 20
  projects to see if anything new has happened. Since RSS readers flag
  the new items, the reader doesn’t even need to wonder whether they’ve
  read this item before or not, the technology takes care of that for
  them.
• Wikis will never replace fully featured content management systems (and
  any that claim to will be as complicated to use as a full CMS), though
  I wouldn’t be surprised to see steps being taken down that path
  that result in wikis being able to do a large proportion of the useful
  functionality of CMS.
• Wikis suffer from the particular problem that it is easy to
  “lose” pages that have been written if nobody has linked to
  them. It is also extremely easy, given even a small group of authors,
  to end up with a nest of linked pages without being quite sure what is
  in any of them, so that newcomers to the group have to spend a long
  time following links to find anything. And without constant
  maintenance, the links and pages in a wiki have a tendency to go stale.
  A fuller exposition of ways to help avoid these problems is given in Leigh Dodd’s blog article on the subject. The Socialtext commercial wiki solves this problem by integrating blogs
  and wikis in such a way that when a page (wiki page) is edited, it goes
  to the top of the list in the same way as a blog posting would. And
  it’s easy to find pages with lots of links to them.
• Ziff-Davis’ Gaming division cut down on email and increased
  productivity significantly by using this system for day-to-day
  coordination, scheduling and requests. It also helps create a
  “group memory” as more useful documents tend to be linked
  to or edited more often than less useful documents.

Via het artikel kwam ik, zoals gezegd, ook terecht bij een tweetal
overzichten met business cases en success stories. Op de site van Traction (“The leader in Enterprise Weblog software”) is een uitgebreide opsomming van succesvolle toepassingen bij bedrijven te vinden. Traction is niet zomaar een leverancier maar echt top of the bill zo blijkt uit
Traction Software Named One of the 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge
Management by KMWorld en Traction
wins Red Herring 100 and EContent 100 Awards.

Socialtext, een tweede leverancier, heeft een prachtig overzicht van Customer Success Stories staan. Hierin worden cases bij beschreven bij Nokia, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Informative, USC Annenberg Center, Ziff Davis Media, Stata Labs, Kodak, Soar Technology, Institute for the Future, Zipp, Global BusinessNetwork, International Design Consultancy, Q LTD, O’Reilly en PC Forum. Meer dan 100 organisaties en 20 grote (global) concerns gebruiken oplossingen van Socialtext. Via deze site wordt beginnen wel heel aantrekkelijk gemaakt: Get Started! Free 30-day trial. Start using Socialtext today!

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