Enterprise Weblogging: Using weblogs for communication & information management

Slide 1: Enterprise Weblogging Using weblogs for communication & information management Michael Angeles

Slide 2: Overview 1. Why weblogs? 3. What are they good for? 5. Roadmap Lucent Technologies – Proprietary Use pursuant to company instruction

Slide 3: Definitions, just in case I am assuming you know a little bit about weblogs Definition of weblogs – A journal, usually updated frequently, sometimes categorized – Usually links to other sites – Can support comments and some stateless interaction – Provides an XML feed

Slide 4: Scope of this talk Yes Not really Mainly internal project I’m not talking about story weblogs telling to the outside world To some extent, personal information Some project information management blogs can spill out into personal whose goals are to build blogs; e.g. See Sun and individual and Microsoft blogs organizational understanding

Slide 5: Why weblogs? Lucent Technologies – Proprietary Use pursuant to company instruction

Slide 6: The elevator pitch Can your employees see themselves in the context of the whole company? Would more informed decisions be made if employees and leaders had access to internal news sources? Weblogs serve this need. By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company — context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events. –Lee Lefever

Slide 7: The story is about people and their needs Knowledge workers - feel greatest need to publish & share – Researchers, engineers, sales force Communities of Practice (CoPs) – need to collaborate & share – Communities organized around projects, products or topics (e.g. Mobility) Chief Information Organization (CIO) – concerned about standards – Enterprise Information Technology people Executives – concerned about profitability, productivity, and cost savings – Officers, upper managers

Slide 8: Why they emerged 1. Healthy information ecologies tend to be diverse – Diverse set set of user types – Diverse set of needs – Diverse set of technologies used to meet these needs 2. The need to publish and share is a common problem – it’s an organizational point of pain – Obstacles to publishing right now – Inflexibility of current tools – Cost and limited human resources

Slide 9: Why they’re suitable for our current needs  The new KM is a bottom-up effort – Using story-telling at a personal level to socialize information and promote understanding – Shifting messaging power to the indidual  Weblogs support diverse ecologies – They allow some interaction (commenting, remote comments via XMLRPC-based trackbacks) – Enable information sharing (RSS/Atom feeds) – Keep control of publishing close to the owners  Weblog software arrives just in time – The software is priced right and is easy to use  Diversity is a good thing – See: Nardi, O’Day on information ecologies

Slide 10: Summary: What makes blogging a good fit

Slide 11: Interesting, but what are they good for? Lucent Technologies – Proprietary Use pursuant to company instruction

Slide 12: Personal and group information management Typical communication and information sharing questions related to projects: – How do we minimize gaps in the individual's understanding of the knowledge of the larger group? – How do we keep the group up to date on progress made by individuals, by the team as a whole? – How do we develop an organizational memory of processes leading to decisions?

Slide 13: The goal is to foster understanding.

Slide 14: Case studies at Lucent Information management – Subject matter weblogs – Document library weblog – Training weblog Project management – Training weblog (really a hybrid) – Product requirements docs

Slide 15: Simple examples: Subject blogs Lucent Technologies – Proprietary Use pursuant to company instruction

Slide 16: Simple examples: Subject blogs Lucent Technologies – Proprietary Use pursuant to company instruction

Slide 17: A more sophisticated example: A training weblog: Needs: Project Summary – Process for easily archiving output Project: System Training on of face to face training new system (Phase II of rollout; – Method for easily communicating updates in timely and efficient internationally and to smaller manner customer teams) – Place for discussion of changing Persona: Engineers Engineer’s needs and issues during roll out Problem: Communicating, Context: sharing information, developing knowledge and – Existing ocument repository was archive cumbersome and static, didn’t provide for interaction; no knowledge base for questions and answers

Slide 18: Conceptual model

Slide 19: How are needs satisfied by a weblog?

Slide 20: Site architecture Published blog content Forms for posting content Instructions for posting content via web or email

Slide 21: Home page schematic

Slide 22: Home page

Slide 23: Blog entry schematic

Slide 24: Blog entry

Slide 25: Tagging blog entries Categorizing or tagging blog entries Lucent Technologies – Proprietary Use pursuant to company instruction

Slide 26: Category and status tags Status flag applied when question is answered Category applied

Slide 27: Taking tagging further: Paragraph-level flagging for Product Requirement Docs Annotating at the paragraph level. Example using Traction Software for collaborative authoring of a product requirements document. Note status flags.

Slide 28: Weblogs a good fit for this project Low cost Ease of use Features and functionality match needs – Distribution – Archiving – Interaction

Slide 29: Roadmap: Where does the story end?

Slide 30: A roadmap for the long view

Slide 31: Now: Blogging software Are individuals blogging already? What level of support can you provide? Select solutions that match your information ecology – Centralized: Provide an enterprise blogging application – Decentralized: Individuals and CoP’s select and manage own blog publishing application

Slide 32: Near term: Support information awareness Bloggers very often use their own news readers to track a lot of weblogs daily Ability to stay abreast of internal/external news may drive frequency of publishing Consider electronic alerting services for vendor purchased news (e.g. ABI, Factiva) and internal databases (e.g. document repositories) as RSS

Slide 33: Example: RSS for all databases RSS, HTML, JS feeds of database search results Lucent Technologies – Proprietary Use pursuant to company instruction

Slide 34: Example: Social bookmarking Lucent Technologies – Proprietary Use pursuant to company instruction

Slide 35: Long term: Support findability of internal blogs Encourage bloggers to use full text feeds (with entire blog entry in the RSS feed) Provide an enterprise RSS/Atom News reader for aggregation and archiving – Off the shelf: Newsgator (Enterprise) – Build your own or use open source software Consider some classification of blog entries

Slide 36: Longer term: Aggregating and classifying

Slide 37: Longer term: Enabling relationships

Slide 38: Relationships to entities in the enterprise Observe relationships Enable expert finding and social behaviors

Slide 39: Thank you. jibbajabba@gmail.com Lucent Technologies – Proprietary Use pursuant to company instruction