I was doing my daily purusing at NPR.org’s blog, Mixed Signals and came across this article from the witty blog host, JJ Sutherland. See below.
Scoble Packs It In
Robert Scoble, for those of you who don’t know, was probably the first guy to be a “corporate” blogger. He did it for Microsoft and soon became something of a household name in tech blog circles. His book Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk With Customers is pretty good and was handed to me before I started blogging for Mixed Signals. He still keeps his blog Scobleizer.
Anyway, he’s a star, in that weird blog way, and he just left Microsoft to go to a company called PodTech. He just did an interview with CIO Insight and one of the things that leapt out at me was his answer to a question about the value of internal blogging (which NPR does not do).
One of the problems at a big company is the e-mail flow. Let’s say I was the manager of a sales team, 60 or 100 salespeople, and every day I wanted a report from them on what they were doing, their experiences, did they close sales. The old way was, everyone would e-mail it to me. Now it’s cluttering up my inbox, maybe keeping me from seeing an important e-mail exchange I should have with a customer. And it doesn’t let the employees help each other. It locks the knowledge into these silos.
Let’s say I left the company — my replacement wouldn’t have access to that information. When I left Microsoft, I left a gig and a half of e-mail that neither I nor my replacement has access to. I’m not allowed to look at it, and Microsoft has it stored on a server somewhere, but they don’t share it with employees, because it’s private. So my replacement can’t look into it, and my coworkers can’t see any of the knowledge I was storing there. And I was storing quite a bit, actually. But if I could get that knowledge out and put it on a blog, then that stuff stays around, because the blog doesn’t get closed down. It’s also searchable, so a manager or employee can look for keywords.
I found it interesting because I thought about how much data I keep in my email box. It’s not just the sexually harassing emails from congressmen… there’s a lot of stuff in there, say raw data on the number of attacks in Baghdad, contacts for folks in the Afghan government, ways of trouble shooting sat phones, all sorts of things that are pretty valuable. But if I did leave the company that knowledge just vanishes, which seems to be a fairly poor way of doing business. If you have a way of storing all that data, would you share it?
-JJ Sutherland
OK, so I will be honest, I had no idea who this cyber rockstar, Robert Scoble, was until I read this piece online at NPR. However, I think that Scoble’s thoughts are fascinating. Blogging at work is in and of itself something that is probably traditionally on the top 10 things not to do at work. I have quite an intimate knowledge of work email. Scoble is basically saying that utilizing a blog would make information more public (which would also make some employers immediately call their lawyers), but he is going so much further to say that blogs make an instantanous database of information that could potentially further the growth of a company by providing instant gratification for information seekers. A person would no longer have to send an email to a supervisor, wait for an answer, and then get on with their job. It could potentially provide an automatic exchange of interactive information.
However, I see some potential roadblocks that could arise if this blog/business model would occur. One thing that I thought of is that people may start getting overly protective of their jobs, titles and postions within a company. As things stand, many times, only one person holds the knowledge to perform certain tasks. An individual may horde information, at times, just to hold onto authority over a job position. If this information becomes public, then the person loses job security.
The second issue I notice is that potentially a person may be able to become more isolated from information - in as much as that person could then say, “Well, I wasn’t aware of the new information on the blog”, or “I didn’t see it”, or “I didn’t go back and read the subsequent comments”. What I am trying to say is that blogs take participation, comments and most importantly, READERS WHO READ THEM. In the current work environment, people are only responsible for the emails in their inbox. It is a small cyber bubble that they work in inside an already miniscule cubicle (usually khaki colored or some other monotone color). If a person tries to state that they did not receive an email, the other person will prove to the first person that they sent it, so what happened on the other end?
It is all about accountability. To say that Scoble’s perspective is progressive is definitely downplaying his thoughts on the blogosphere. Maybe I need to pick up his book to see what his comments are on the other points I am concerned with - I am sure that he has already thought of them.
By the way, I know I am already breaking the golden rule of blogging by posting this on my blog without commenting on the post by JJ Sutherland. Don’t worry, I am going there now.
