We are going to have to agree to disagree on this.

I have logically proven that worksite style blogs will add value within an organization by improving communication. Any decent CEO can recognize that improved internal communication will lead to both cost savings and improved ability to take advantage of all sales opportunities. The result of that is increased profits.

The risk of deploying this technology is minimal from a business perspective and the business rewards make it easily worth it.

Smart CEOs understand what many narrow minded IT organizations do not get. There is a risk to staying the course with old-school technology, such as Lotus Notes or Document Management Systems. The risk is that competitors will gain market share and competitive advantage by leveraging the power of technology that created over $2 Billion in value for consumer sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook.

Wordpress has over 20 million blog users. Technorati tracks over 57 million blogs.

Why wouldn’t a company want to add Enterprise class business focused worksite blogs and wikis to their current tool set?

Rod

Re #1 … I asked for evidence for your original assertion, not a restatement of such with an extreme example. I know you are asserting this to be true, and believe it passionately, but that doesn’t make it so. Once again, what is your evidence? Or is it merely an assertion?

Put another way, can you cite examples of actual firms that use “worksites” as you conceive they should be used and get the incremental profit result you are asserting to be true?

Re #2 … I do agree that DMSs add extra steps, but to call those a “tax” denotes great negativity. One could equally say that being forced to use a worksite blog, rather than email and Word, was a “process tax”. It depends on your perspective, what you are used to, what you are “selling/advocating”, etc. My point was mainly to say that there are offerings on the market to address the issue you raised … blogs and wikis are merely the latest cool thing in technology to address this. Be careful that *you* don’t cross the line from being an “innovation creator advocate” to a “blogging bigot”.

Re #3 … You are citing an example of where a blog is better suited than email, but that doesn’t prove your point. You wanted the world to find this post and thus think that you are intelligent and well-reasoned guy … hence you posted it to a public blog. If you wanted to discuss a private matter with a person, you would be likely to use email.

Email is designed for one-to-one and one-to-many *private* communications; a blog is designed for *more public* readership. You have to choose the tool that’s right for the job given what “effectiveness” means in the instance. And anyway, if you use appropriate add-on software products, like Quest Archive Manager (formerly Aftermail), you can have many of the things you want (tagging, hyperlinking, accessibility beyond the original distribution list, etc).

Finally, “WorkSite” is actually a product name of Interwoven (http://www.interwoven.com/products/worksite/), originally from iManage. Given that they had the foresight to embrace that word many years in advance of you, shouldn’t you equally recommend that customers embrace their products?

M.

Re your comments

#1 – Let’s take the other extreme. What if we prevented all the people in your company from communicating within each other. Profits would collapse. If shipping couldn’t talk to sales and sales couldn’t talk to marketing or product design. Of course improved internal communication would increase profits.

#2 – Document management systems do not solve this problem, instead they act as a tax on a company, adding extra work steps. This blog and the associated comments keeps a complete record of every step in our conversation. We did not have to do anything extra to submit my original post or your comments into a document management system. If we had been working inside a bank, and we were discussing a potential customer loan on an access controlled internal blog, we would have a full record of everything for regulators and internal auditors, and again, we would not have had to do any additional work.

#3 – Of course information within blogs is more effective than information buried in email. How did you find this page? Would you have found it if I had only emailed it to a limited group? Emails do not have comment systems that are viewable by a large audience (internal or external). Emails do not allow tagging, bookmarking. You can’t include a hyperlink to Bob’s email from last week in an article.

Re #1 … what evidence do you have that improved communication results in increased profits? Supranormal profits flow to organizations that can build barriers to market entry (as per Porter) … if such technical capabilities are available to all, how can that lead to barriers?

Re #2 … it’s called a “document management system”.

Re #3 … yes, I’m sure email is reduced … but is it merely a replacement of one form of textual communication for another? One goes down, another goes up. Is there a net reduction in the amount of text that has to be created for communication, or is it merely a migration between tools? And if it is merely a migration, do we have any evidence that it is more effective?

M.

Executive teams everywhere should be terrified – and thinking social media.