Internal-blogs | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Web 2.0 is knocking on French companies’ doors

February 20, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

A few words about a recentTNS Sofres survey about the use of web 2.0 in France and user’s expectations.

Just one thing to take into consideration : the following numbers are about web 2.0 users in France that’s to say, according to the survey, 58% of the population. I think it’s even more : people who are “in” can tell they use web 2.0 tools but I think many people use them without knowing whether they use web 2.0 or not.

To make it short, 76 % (out of the 58%) want their companies to create blogs in order they may express themselves. I’d like to know what they mean : do they mean blogging on the internet or on the intranet ?

I also wonder about their purpose. Express themselves…but about what ? I’d like the question to be asked : just to communicate or to work more efficiently ? Perhaps it’s not the question, employees will surely take the most of better information fluidity and transversality and develop suitable practices if it makes things easier for them, thats to say, in a politically correct way, improve their productivity (doing the same amount of work with less efforts).

Also interesting, 74% think their company should join the discussions on the internet where people talk about it. It suggests me two things : first they like their company more than usually thought since they want it to defend itself, second that in people’s minds the frontier between inside and outside the enterprise is clearly disappearing. One more thing : french companies are more and more comfortable with using blogs to sell products but very few use this mean to sell themselves, but the best way to join a discussion is to have also its own voice. Perhaps this trend that’s seems much more developed in the US will soon become more common in France .

Last point, 41% would like their company to create employee’s communities on facebook. I’m very cautious about that. I’m not sure facebook is the perfect tool for working (sorry to spoil the fun but the purpose is to make work more efficient…even if we also try to make it more pleasant). Sure it’s an efficient tool to discover what social networks are and how to behave on it, but there are many tools that seem more relevant when considering business communities. Anyway, perhaps if they ask for facebook communities it’s because they don’t know about enterprise social software which may be more acceptable for their IT department. One more thing : using blogs to promote a product on the web and using blog within the company are not the same things, they use different levers and you don’t need the same competences for each of them. Choose wisely the people you’ll ask to help you… Remember the enterprise is not the web and your people are employees before being bloggers !

Whatever, it’s more than an emerging trend. It’s not a challenge for tomorrow but a present issue.

Surprised ? What say you ?

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Misc., Web & Usages Tagged With: Communication, Communities, corporate-blogs, enterprise-social-software, facebook, internal-blogs

Do managers have to spend all their time managing interactions ?

January 4, 2007 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Indeed another way to ask this question would be : “must people be given tools to organize themselves their interactions or is it the manager’s job to control everything”.

In fact you can see both situations in organizations. In some you’ll have few control, tools like wikis or blogs that allow people to communicate and organize themselves in communities of practices, a management based on self responsability, collective intelligence, flexibility, innovation… In others you’ll have…exactly the opposite, that’s to say very directive management, no autonomy (that’s to say no faith in people), strict procedures and now way to communicate and exchange freely.

In both ways the organization is the result of what’s thought being best for performance. So I’m asking what is the role of a manager : develop business, develop people, or mainely manage relations between people. Mainly ? Yes, because if you’re strict on people’s autonomy, you’ll need to hire more and more managers, not to think about business but juste to manage interpersonal relations. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Misc. Tagged With: blogs, interaction, internal-blogs, management

Blogs increase IBM’s intranet readership

December 2, 2006 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

ibm As we all now, IBM counts thousands bloggers. What people often ignore is that IBM also have internal blogs that preceded the public blogs.

In this interview, Christopher Barger, IBM’s “chief blogging officer” tels something quite interesting about internal blog’s effect on intranet frequentation:

“we launched the blogging initiative internally, and that story on our intranet experienced six times the normal readership”

As it’s a well known fact that intranet managers meet lots of difficulties making people use corporate intranets, it may be an interesting clue for them.

This brings another question : can we consider that blog based intranets increases the ROI of all the others applications that are on the intranet ?

Any idea?

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace Tagged With: IBM, internal-blogs, intranet, ROI

Blogs as a management tool: what’s important is content

July 19, 2006 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

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 platform [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Misc., Software & Tools Tagged With: blogs, bluekiwi, internal-blogs, knowledge-management, management, management-2.0

Using internal blogs as a management tool

July 14, 2006 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

collaboration Internal blogs are not a new thing. But, most often, they’re the consequence of isolated initiatives, someone who once says “a blog would be a good thing to manage this project”. Since they’re not a part of a strategic vision and they don’t bring as added value as they could.

Let’s see how internal blogs can improve management.

Consider, as a basic premise, that every employee in your company has a blog. An internal blog, that’s important because what’s said on blog is a private and confidential as what you can put on an intranet. Another significant thing is that it’s not a collective blog or a project manager’s blog where you can comment either…it’s an internal blogging platform…you’ll understand later why this point is so important to me. In this situation, and due to a professionnal context, we’d rather say notepad instead of blog…
So let your employees blog (or write on their notepad), about their job, their win, their best practices, their ideas…and think about what it can bring to the company. [Read more...]