iaocblog :: Blogging at IBM

At this moment we have about 2800 internal weblogs (on a total worldwide population of about 330.000 IBM'ers.) with about 12700 entries. About 200 blogs have more than 10 posts on them...

On the other hand, editors can come from any part of the company; engineers, communications, research, software... you name it.

Here's a screenshot from one of our internal blogs.

Some of these blogs are "information blogs" linking to interesting articles, URl's, RSS feeds etc... but some are used for project management.

In this case blogs are used to get the team on "the same page" with regards to progress being made or issues being tackled.

We also have external blogs, mainly written by our people from developerWorks. As these are written by our engineers and developers they tend to cover specific topics in their area of expertise.

When thinking about blogs in a manufacturing industry (or any industry in fact) I would think blogs (and Wikis) can certainly be used for project management.

Here's an interesting article on the subject by Tim at "Infosential".

I have used my internal blog for project management with a team of colleagues a couple of months ago. We were testing a new product and needed to keep a virtual team updated on the progress we made. Through RSS feeds this was automatic and (very important at our company) didn't clutter the mailbox.

The easy way to comment on milestones or issues increased the interaction in the team compared to regular phonecalls or sending out "update e-mails".

But I have also seen that blogging is not for everyone. Some people are so used to the "older" methods of working that they really do not jump on the wagon. Being able to change people and get them to participate from the start is the biggest part of the job.

Keywords: wiki, Industry, IAOC

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Industry

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Re: Blogging at IBM

by Don Dunnington on Fri 04 Mar 2005 07:57 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

Phil,
I am finding the reluctance to take up yet another new technology is the biggest barrier I face in getting people in my industry to try blogging. Have you found that training helps?

Is it possible we've reached a point of technology adoption exhaustion?

I think it more likely that we just haven�t found the business driver that makes the blog essential to the business. Email wasn�t an overnight success. I�m sure my company isn�t the only one that had email on its LAN for years, and no one bothered to use it. It took the Internet, and the possibility of communicating with the whole world, that drove people to open their email readers and discover the message from the guy down the hall.

Re: Re: Blogging at IBM

by Phil Borremans on Tue 08 Mar 2005 11:54 AM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

Hi Don, sorry for the late re-comment. This afternoon I gave a presentation on blogging and RSS to my peers of the Belgian PR Center (our industry association) and it came to my mind that I needed to answer your question.

The first thing we do (and I did just that this PM while presenting) is that we assume that everyone knows and understands...

The questions I had from my peers during my presentation ranged from "why use RSS for media relations" to "where does this - weblogs and RSS - leave all the rest: press releases, conferences etc...

Same goes for introducing a new technology in a company. Never overestimate - always underestimate the "maturity" (I use this term with all respect) of your team.

Then get everyone on the same page and demonstrate and prove - where possible - the benefits of the new technology. What's in if for each and everyone of them.

Once this step is taken, goal setting must happen with clear milestones for everyone and for the project as such.

And then it is communicate, check, feedback, refocus and communicate, check.... in a continuous loop.

In short, it is never "plug and play" or "point and click"... it is so much more and hard work.

Hope this helped.

Re: Re: Re: Blogging at IBM

by Anonymous on Thu 17 Mar 2005 04:13 PM EST | Permanent Link

Sounds like what we are experiencing with our Intranet