Intranet Blogging

Times have changed, Organizational Communications have not

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:01:12 +0000

Most companies continue to be run the same way companies ran centuries ago

Despite all the changes in the environment brought by globalization, technology and other business catalysts, reality is that large organizations today remain awfully similar to the ones decades ago. Large hierarchical structures continue to be the norm and decision making power and resource allocations continue to be held by management. Companies and large Government institutions continue to be for the most part a copy of the companies, the church or the army.

The need to compete globally with a variety of rivals that do not necessarily share the same business model as you presents a formidable challenge to today’s companies. One very exciting possibility is to allow all of your employees to participate on the innovation of the company. Who cares if the latest product comes out of an idea from the chief scientist, a sales guy or a junior engineer? Everybody should be able to contribute to the organizational well being and the traditional model of heavily specialized work and its departamental silos have typically being in the way of that company wide collaboration.

Independent of the inertia of the past there are several factors that get in the way of allowing company-wide collaboration to actually happen: fear of losing control of the company information and the lack of tools to make company-wide collaboration effective.

Great Corporate Blogging Study (with interviews)

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:08:07 +0000

Northeastern University and Backbone Media just published recently a corporate blogging paper. The paper has very good content about the usage of corporate blogs and most interestingly it has 20 interviews with real corporate bloggers, each from a different company. The bloggers are not necessarily internal bloggers, but the usage of the blog is very simlar to intranet blogs as each of the bloggers had a goal in mind to achieve by starting their blog.

The study can be found here.

Via MicroPersuasion. You can also find the link to the paper on my del.icio.us account (on the right sidebar of the blog).

Who is using Intranet Blogs?

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 21:41:14 +0000

According to CIO Insight more companies are using Internal Blogs than what vox populi suggests. Intranet Blogs are already deployed in a relatively small number of companies, but the number of companies in pilots or in evaluation suggests the number will be much higher pretty soon. In this May 2006 survey among CIOs, they found out that 18% of the respondants already has deployed internal blogs, 15% is testing o piloting the technology and 26% is evaluating or tracking it. In total, the number of companies in all stages of the cycle is 60%, compared to the 40% remaining that is not interested for now.

The survey also has interesting data for Wikis, Podcasts and other types of collaboration tools. You can find the survey results here: Emerging Mobility, Collaboration, and Business Process Technologies .

Community Built In

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 18:55:49 +0000

Another key difference for Intranet blogs vs. Internet blogs is the fact that Intranet blogs start with at least a couple of communities ready for them. A community is the group of people that follow the blog regularly and therefore care to make great comments, offer help for some of the content and in generally tend to help build the blog, as great blogs tend to have strong comment streams that add to the topics posted. Internet blogs, on the contrary, are usually born with either a small community or no community at all and grow one over time.

Intel Announces Collaboration to Launch Web 2.0 Business Internet Suite

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 23:50:04 +0000

This ia a very exciting announcement that Intel did at Web 2.0 Conference today. Here is the text in full of Intel's press accouncement. What do you think about it? Is the packaging of blogs, podcasts, wikis and other tools a good step towards massive business adoption of those tools?

Full Press release by Intel Corporation follows:

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Intel Corporation today announced at the Web 2.0 Conference today that it is collaborating with several software companies on the launch of SuiteTwo, a business Internet suite.

The integrated suite, a family of interconnected services combined to improve productivity and enable high-engagement marketing, is comprised of business Web 2.0 capabilities from leading software companies, including Six Apart, Socialtext, NewsGator, SimpleFeed and SpikeSource.

Intel Capital, Intel's venture capital organization, pioneered the assembly of this suite. Intel's Software and Solutions Group plans to make the suite available through its extensive OEM and reseller sales channels as well as participating software partners.

Information Controls on Intranet blogs - Why no freedom is no control

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:25:08 +0000

Many company executives feel that if they give too much latitude to their employees things can seriously ran out of control. Sensationalist stories about bloggers blasting out nasty secrets of executives or politicians only add to this fear. If the water cooler conversation and hallway rumor mill is bad enough, why should we give employees the megaphone to amplify this?

Starting to write my Intranet Blogging Book

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:55:13 +0000

Over the last few weeks I have been working, perhaps not as efficiently on writing a book on Intranet Blogging. I have been working at nights and as I said, I have had plenty of distractions. I have managed to basically get an outline of the book and then a first pass at the outline of each chapter. I also started this blog to engage other Intranet bloggers like me to discuss some of the ideas I want to develop in the book.

However, I had a bit of an epiphany last night and decided to change two things:

I have started to actually write the book. I guess I was having a bit of stage fright on how to make it perfect. I wrote last night until 2 AM and it felt great. I want to keep the momentum so the book gets a good deal of content by the end of November.
I also was a bit too shy on placing posts here. The main reason for it is that I am working on the basics of my book and didn't wanted to bug you guys and gals with stuff that was too basic and not enough food for thought. I have also decided to change that. I will place more posts here, even the basic stuff and let you decide if they are worthy of a dicussion or not. Please help me steer the conversation appropiately, since I don't want to fall on the other extreme... but I do want to speed up things a bit.

Now, if you were to read a book on Intranet Blogging. What topic do you like for it to cover? WHat will be a absolute must have?

Moving the Blog to Movable Type

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:52:48 +0000

Sorry for the trashing but I am moving to Movable Type. I wanted to build this site under Word Press and I was impressed with the vast array of tools of WP. I was particularly impressed with the design tools that the blogging environment has.

However, I was spending too much time trying to figure out PHP. Since this blog is about a discussion on Intranet Blogging and not about having the most stunning design I decided to move to Movable Type, the platform I am most familiar with. All the posts have been moved and soon I will move all the comments too.

A few changes, so please update your settings and links for this blog:

Main URL is now: http://intranetblogging.com

Feed is now under Feedburner, so URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/IntranetBlogging

Thanks for your support.

Setting up an Internal Blogosphere: What kinds of considerations need to be taken into account?

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:35:59 +0000

I'd like to start with a series of discussions about the setting of Internal Blogospheres. First, I'd like to ask you all: What kinds of considerations do you think you need to have before setting up the internal blogging environment? Which Internal departments need to be involved on the discussions before the Internal Blogosphere goes live?

This is my first pass at the categories of issues that need to be addressed. We'll go deeper on them on later posts:

Ethical and Business Principles
Legal
Human Resources
Community Guidelines

Despite the fact that the blogs are internal, I'd assume that PR also needs to be involved due to potential leaks.

What do you all think? Am I missing any points? Should the list be shorter?

Intranet Blog definition

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:27:39 +0000

Let’s start with discussing this definition. It is something basic, but I think it can help save some headaches as we move into more complex topics. Please help me get this polished.

An Intranet Blog is an online publication with its entries ordered on reverse chronological order that can only be accessed by people participating on a given Intranet. Access to the Intranet is usually restricted to people meeting a certain criteria (employees, members, business partners). Intranet Blog participants usually adhere to certain ethical, conduct and confidentiality standards in their participation.

Welcome to Intranet Blogging

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:22:47 +0000

This is Intranet Blogging, the blog that is 100% focused on Intranet blogs. Its intended audience are Intranet bloggers at all kinds of organizations.

This blog is Published by Ricardo Carreon, an Intranet Blogger at Intel Corporation. Please read the “About” Section for a detailed description of this blog and its content.

Welcome and Looking forward to great discussions on the topic.

About Intranet Blogging

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:42:01 +0000

This blog is focused only on Intranet blogging, the blogging that takes place inside corporate, government or organizational Intranets. Many large companies all opver the world are using blogs to communicate and many more are about to do so.

My name is Ricardo Carreón and I am an Intranet blogger at Intel Corporation. I have been blogging within the corporate Intranet since September 2005, my blogs was one of the first four “Senior Leader” blogs at the company. My job at Intel is not to be a ful time blogger, I have a day job and that is to run the Latin America business for the company. I started to blog to improve the communications in my team, which is large and geographically distributed in many countries.

Blogging for me has been an experience that has allowed me to achieve my goal of communicating my team and has allowed me to communicate better with the rest of the organization.

This blog is focused on Intranet Blogging topics. Its intended audience are Intranet bloggers from all kinds of organizations, from Companies to Government Entities to NGOs. If you are an Intranet blogger or you are considering becoming one, join us for the conversation. I will go and post topics from basic to advanced ones and will rely on your feedback to shape the agenda of this blog. The blog will be updated with a cadence of about once per week.

This is not an company blog. The blog is to discuss techniques, ideas and tools to make your Intranet Blogging experience a sucessful one. All opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect the opinion of my employer.

Enjoy the ride!