Weblogs en wikis binnen bedrijven

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Frank Janssen van Frankwatching

Weblogs en wikis staan uitgebreid in de aandacht. Bij de disucssies gaat de aandacht veelal uit naar onderwerpen als de effecten op de journalistieke media, de kracht als communicatiekanaal en de invloed op maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen. Wat meestal echter onderbelicht blijft is dat er ook op het terrein van gebruik binnen (en tussen) bedrijven nogal wat staat te gebeuren.

Op de site van The Gilbane Report, een bekende Amerikaanse nieuwsbrief over content management, is hierover een uitstekend artikel gepubliceerd. Met veel aandacht voor de mogelijkheden en beperkingen van deze nieuwe oplossingen. Het artikel leidt ons ook naar leveranciers van oplossingen, business cases en success stories.

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!