Stephanie made an interesting post today reporting on a Suw Charman talk over at Google.
Now this is something I am directly involved in. I use both socially and feel that they are good and useful tools in businesses. One of the problems, from my point of view, is that technical enterprises tend to attempt to solve problems through the use of software tools. Most problems are either social (people) or organizational (people and structures) problems and can only be resolved by directly addressing the causes of the problem.
Personally I would love to read the blogs of my boss and of my Director. I feel it is a much better (and well organized chronologically) medium than newsletters or email distributions and could contribute towards animating business life in my service and organization respectively.
In a service comprised of 12 or so members a wiki would be an excellent way of sharing and building info and documents.
The problem of course is once again people and the organization but (un)naturally my organization is spending a disproportionate amount of time on deciding which tools we need and focusing on the technical platform and the functional matrix of the tools on option.
A social and organizational matrix might be a more efficient way of attacking the problem because in the past our IT department has been known to propose tools that were neither useable or understood and were thus never adopted.
More about this later if it interests you.
on Jun 28th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
It sure interests me. I’ve been thinking about this matter for quite a while. I also find the security issue important. What if, the competition starts reading the CEO’s blog in order to find out what you are up to; just a ridicule example, but think about the whole thing. It’s complicated, isnt it?
on Jun 28th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Nothing to stop the CEO blogging internally though but yes there is a security issue here. Being a government administration there are less fears (or more political worries whatever way you look at it …)
on Jul 5th, 2007 at 6:54 am
Hello!
Nice post! Yes Blogs and Wikis are very useful tools if used correctly.
Especially writing a blog, I think that helps you a lot in receiving feedbacks and keeping update.
Maybe what stops the CEOs from using these tools or blogging is the fear of being judged or, as J.S. said, to be observed by the competitors.
I’m an executive and I run my own blog but it would be nice to see more colleagues doing the same! Yes things are changing and it seems that lately somebody is starting to move and blog but…let’s see!
Andrea