If you’ve read my post about blogs as a management tool, your reaction may (and should) have been “this will generate so much content that it will quickly besome unable”. This clear-headed reaction is half right, half wrong, depending on how the platform is conceived.
Internal blogs have to aims: facilitating communication and managing content. The second aim (and partly the first) is highly depending not on the generated information but on how anybody can find what he’s looking for.
For example, anyone who wants to know what was written on one subject will use search tools based on word or tags search. That’s the first level.
But managers may want to have a specific access to information… and that’s what gives a real added value to the internal blog platformPerharps each service manager may want to access the platforme from a portail that’s giving him informations about specific domains: who writes about such or such subject, what are the keywords people in my service are using, what seems to be important to them considering their work and their global feeling, did a specific subject take importance in a specific period (if I can see everybody’s getting interested in something it will be usefull for me to know why…and if it did happen in the past)…who have an especially collaborating relationship with who…
The list is not over and you understand that, beyond the employee’s blogs you have to produce aggregated content to deliver HR or management indicators.
So the platform is nearly nothing without the ability of allowing as much as specific parametered portails as the company needs: for example one global, one for HR, one for marketing, one for labs… That’s the most difficult part of the technical side of the projet (there’s also an huge human side we’ll talk about in a next post) but it’s a success key factor.
Her…..I was near forgetting to mention it…the solution that makes all of that possible exists.It’s called blueKiwi. I collaborated with them on deploying it…and it works well. Technically…and humanly in terms of new social practices.
