Jonathan Grudin

Project Blogs as a Solution to Enterprise Knowledge Management Challenges

Position Paper
Blogs or applications with blog capabilities could play a major role in overcoming knowledge management challenges that have long resisted technical solutions. The difficulty of capturing, preserving, and providing access to the knowledge and expertise that is forgotten or that leaves when employees move on has been a major concern and the focus of myriad systems, including document repositories. None have worked particularly well. An internal ‘project blog’ can be an easily maintained ongoing ‘ReadMe’ file that is missing from SharePoint or other document repositories. Most people adding a document to a repository announce and explain the document through email to a project distribution list. This explanation is then forgotten, lost, and unavailable to those who might later want to understand the reason the document is there. An entry to a project blog that holds a link to the repository (or is a feature built into a repository) can be easier to compose than the email explanation, and far more useful. An analogy is the comments that are supposed to accompany code, but in this case composition is often no added burden and is more immediately rewarded.

Many common uses of blogs can have an enterprise role, but the internal ‘project blog’ is not yet widely appreciated. Jon Udell has written about their potential in a couple essays, without elaborating on the features and conventions that may make them most useful. I have created two simple project blogs. My experiences convince me that they can be effortlessly and immediately useful. It also revealed some dos and don’ts. Blog tools can support a broad range of uses; one critical feature of most blogs that is not enforceable through software is maintenance of a single ‘voice’ even for a multi-authored site. The value of adhering to a single voice is not immediately clear to all project members but can be critical to success.

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