We began our pilot of SharePoint My Sites almost two months ago. Of the more than 400 people we invited, 320 created a My Site. For many of them, however, this was the last time they used their My Site. To put it bluntly, they don't need a My Site to do their job. So, many perceive that time spent working on their My Site is frivolous, or worse, wasteful. At the same time, there are a few pilot participants who, for whatever reason, have the vision that their My Site will improve the way they do their job, and will make them more valuable employees. It's not easy being a pioneer. They have to figure out how to do things on their own, often on their own time. In this post I will share some of the interesting business-related use cases for internal employee blogs that have surfaced in our pilot.

Of the 320 people who have created a My Site, 20% created a blog site. However, when you take a look at how many people are actually posting to their blog on a regular basis that number drops to only about a dozen. Here are some of the creative ways they are using their blogs:

• A knowledge worker shares job-related information with colleagues, such as summarizing articles from the Internet.


• A software developer shares code snippets with other developers.

• A software developer uses his blog like a personal notebook to keep track of how to do routine tasks, such as calculating time-zones and zip codes from address data.


• A knowledge worker writes entertaining stream-of-consciousness posts about a project that he is working on.


• A summer intern keeps a daily journal of what he has learned, observed, and accomplished.

So, even though only 4% of the pilot users are blogging regularly, we are seeing tremendous creativity and resourcefulness among the My Site bloggers. As we deploy My Sites to the enterprise, we don't expect the percentage of active internal bloggers to grow beyond 4% for a long time, and we are comfortable with that.

Have you seen any other interesting use cases for internal employee blogs?

We introduced blogging within our enterprise nearly two years ago. It has been an excellent way for senior managers to connect with people at all levels of their organizations. The executive blogs have been extremely popular among individual contributors who enjoy the opportunity to interact directly with their senior leader. They see it as a refreshing move toward transparency and breaking down traditional hierarchy. Based upon the number of comments, these blogs are generate a lot of interest and passion. At this point, there are about a dozen senior leader blogs across the enterprise. However, as we look to the future, we would like to enable any person within the enterprise to publish their own blog. The response from some executives is, "Why does everyone need a blog?"

Given that we have only used blogs for a single purpose to date, namely for senior executives to communicate, share, and interact with their large organizations, it's no wonder they're not familiar with other use cases. Here are some use cases that support the idea of giving everyone a blog:

• Knowledge Management - Blogs can be used to capture and publish knowledge that someone else can later find and use. A personal blog can replace a paper notebook or diary and contain ideas, best practices, and lessons learned.


• Personal Branding - Blogs can be a platform that individual use to sell their personal brand. It can highlight skills, accomplishments, and results. This information is searchable to those who are looking for people with particular experience.


• Meeting Notes - Blogs are a great repository for meeting notes/minutes. People with a wireless laptop can "live-blog" during the meeting and publish their notes in real time, for the benefit of others who will be able to search them later.


• Status Reports - Status reports for individuals or projects can be stored within a blog. This makes it easy to view a series of status reports in context. Managers can subscribe to the feeds of their employees' or projects' blogs so that they are kept informed, with minimal overhead.

To be successful, blog technology should be accompanied with specific process change that incorporates blogging. These process changes must be driven from the top-down. For example, a manager might mandate that going forward all status reports must be recorded within a personal blog, and not in email. This type of mandate provides the necessary impetus to begin changing the culture. You cannot expect most people to voluntarily adopt new technologies if the technologies are perceived as being separate from their work processes.

In most cases, blogging replaces functions that are performed within email today. However, a blog has tremendous advantages over an email message. A blog has single instance storage. It is sharable and searchable. A blog can be tagged or categorized, to make it easier for people to find content later. A blog is linkable. (Try linking to an email.) You can syndicate blog content using RSS or ATOM. Blogs maintain context and allow people to comment on posts and other comments.

What are some creative ways that you are using or plan to use blogs within your enterprise? What are you doing to encourage blog adoption among the masses?

In my last post I listed nine benefits of internal employee blogs. In addition to the potential benefits, internal employee blogs may pose some risks, including the following:

• Potential disclosure of false, personal, sensitive, or embarrassing information that could put the company at risk – Assuming these blogs are only accessible inside the firewall, this risk is somewhat decreased. However, when you give every person the ability to publish content that could be accessed by every other person in the company, there is good chance that someone will eventually post content that should not have been published. The biggest deterrent to intentional abuse is to ensure that the name of the author is always clearly visible. The lack of anonymity assists most people in making the right decision. Additionally, a strictly enforced policy with real penalties is a good practice. Many companies today have adopted the simple policy of "don't do anything stupid. And, "if you do, you will be fired." Then they follow through on that threat quickly and decisively.
• Difficult or impossible to monitor or control blog content – The old model of having a corporate gatekeeper edit and approve any content that it published to a large audience cannot support the scale required by social networking technologies. It remains to be seen if automated, rules-based content scanners will be able to flag and perhaps quarantine risky content. Making authorship explicit and having an enforced policy should sufficiently mitigate this risk.
• Loss of productivity – Of course the big fear from many managers is the potential loss of productivity. Are people going to stop doing their "real job" in favor of posting to their blog? It's unlikely. This sounds like the worry that employees would abuse telephone or internet access. Most companies at least seen clear to allow every employee to have access to these technologies. In reality, only a small percentage of employees will consistently write to their personal blog anyway. Of those, an even smaller percentage will develop a following beyond their immediate team. In the end, every person's performance should be measured against quantifiable job objectives. Effective performance and compensation systems will help ensure that people do what is in the best interest of the company.
• Increased support costs – With any new application there are ongoing support costs. That is also true for internal employee blogs. In addition to looking for a solution that is supportable and robust, consider the offsetting benefits and base your decision on the total value of the technology, not just the cost. In my current company we plan to leverage the blogging functionality built into Sharepoint (MOSS 2007), which should keep the support costs in check. When you compare the relatively low cost of internal employee blogs with the potential benefits outlined in my previous post, the decision should be clear.
• Content will become stale – With any content repository, one of the greatest risks is that the content will lose its value over time. It is difficult to automate the process of assessing content value on any basis other than age. We assume that the older the content is, the greater the potential is for being stale. While that may be true, it is equally true that some content is stale within hours and other content retains its value for years. This risk should be considered as part of an overarching content and records management strategy. Of all the risks, this one may be the most difficult to mitigate adequately. To date, the most common approach is to accept this risk or enforce a draconian retention rule to the entire repository instead of basing retention on the content itself.

While there are some risks related to internal employee blogs, most of them can be successfully mitigated with an effective risk management strategy. Can you think anything I missed?

I work for a Fortune 500 company with nearly 30,000 employees scattered across the U.S. We have been experimenting with internal employee blogs for a couple of years. However, to date only senior business leaders have been allowed to have a blog. These popular sites have gone a long way toward improving transparancy and providing a way for the masses to provide feedback. We’re now on the cusp of deciding whether or not to open up internal blogging to every employee.

To be clear, these are internal blogs. They would be accessible only to employees and contractors inside the firewall. Although the capability would be made available to all employees, we assume that a large majority would never actually make the effort to create a personal blog. And, of those that do, only a small percentage will ever attract much of a following. Even so, there are a number of people, mostly business leaders, who have a hard time grasping why we would even consider letting any employee write his or her own blog. After all, how is letting our employees blog going to reduce expense or increase revenue?

• Publish content instantly and efficiently. Sure, there’s always email. However, email lacks context. Whether it is a line manager who needs to get the word out to his team or a thought leader who wants to float a new idea while its fresh, there is power in self publishing.
• Capture and search knowledge that would otherwise only exist in the heads of our people. There’s a lot of knowledge burried in email. Unfortunately, it is completely useless to everyone except the person who happens to have a copy. Even for them, its unlikely they will find it when they need it. Email retention policies and quotas result in deleting messages that still have residual value. When an employee leaves a company, his or her email account is deleted within days of their leaving, and a long with it, the embedded knowledge. Blogs, on the other hand, are accessible to and searchable by everyone in the company. The knowledge contained in a blog could remain as long as people are accessing it regularly, even when the original owner has long since left.
• Provide a communication platform for thought leaders, regardless of where they are in the official corporate hierarchy. As I mentioned, only a few leaders at the top of the food chain have the privilige of blogging in our company today. This sends the message that we have a traditional, top-down hierarchy. To our people, it can appear that we don’t value the thoughts and ideas of people unless they happen to be an executive. By opening up blogging to the masses, that all changes. Thought leaders will emerge from any level in the corporate hierarchy. What matters is the value of their ideas, not the size of their pay check.
• Build internal, business related communities of interest that would not otherwise exist. People naturally converge around known likenesses. In a large organization, even the most unusual interests are shared with several other people. Until now, finding those people has been next to impossible. In my own experience there are people scattered throughout our company who are passionate about collaborative technology. Most of them have no idea what’s happening in this space and who is on point. If they had an idea, they wouldn’t know who to contact. By writing a blog, I could begin to biuld a community of interest around collaborative technology. I could share ideas and expect truthful feedback from people were previously invisible to me.
• Allow people to market themselves internally, demonstrate the value they have to offer, and gain status and exposure. We all have the responsibility of marketing ourselves. In the past, each person’s potential sphere of influence was limited by their position in the corporate hierarchy and geographic location. With a blog, smart people can market themselves and their successes much more broadly. However, they need to be careful. No one likes a self-promoting bragger.
• Allow people to subscribe to the blogs that interest them through an RSS reader. Thanks to syndicated content, we don’t need to visit our ten favorite of blogs looking for new posts. Instead we can monitor our favorite blogs efficiently through a single RSS news reader.
• Create an efficient feedback loop between the blogger and readers/subscribers. A blog is not a broadcast, it is a dialog. Blog feedback is a gift. By putting an idea out in the open, a blogger opens herself or himself to feedback from the masses. Almost all feedback has some value, even negative feedback.
• Support openness and transparency when any employees are empowered with the ability to publish content. The executives in our company who post to their own blogs have received extremely positive feedback from their staffs. Employees feel like they now have a direct line to the business leader instead of waiting for messages to trickle down and morph through the management layers. They know that the business leader will read and respond to their comments in public. Almost no front line employee would dare send an email to a CxO. However, commenting on that CxO’s blog feels much less threatening. This sense of openness and transparency grows exponentially when all employees are allowed to blog. Suddenly I’m able to benefit from the ideas of a person across the country who happens to be in a completely different business unit.
• Encourage people to blog internally instead of externally, where the risks to would be much higher. Okay, I know. I’m blogging externally. Ideally, however, we would always prefer employees to blog internally, as opposed to on the Internet. We want to secure our intellectual capital and ensure that our best interests are protected. Most employees will find that an internal blog will satisfy their need to share and build a following. Without an internal option, however, more people will turn to public blogging.
  

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. I’ve still not answered the question of how letting our employees blog will reduce expense or increase revenue? I can’t do that, at least in terms of hard dollars. In my experience, however, the costs and risks are low enough to stand up to soft benefits.

Are there benefits I missed? Have you been built a business case for employee blogging on hard benefits?