IT wrestles with workplace blogging

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There are benefits, but be cautious, analysts and users say

By Mary K Pratt | Framingham | Monday, 26 November, 2007

There's no question that blogs are multiplying in cyberspace. Now they're infiltrating businesses, too, even if the IT department hasn't sanctioned their implementations.

"I've definitely seen the problem with unsanctioned blogs finding their way into enterprises. It's happening more than IT would like to believe," says Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Executives realise it's a losing battle to lock it down, so they're bringing in official solutions. It's not everybody, but there are plenty of IT shops that realise this is coming whether they like it or not."

The movement of blogs from being a primarily social technology to a business tool is happening fast. As a result, IT workers are developing best practices for implementing, managing and maintaining them. At the same time, corporate IT departments, executive sponsors and the business units that want blogs are trying to build business cases, craft user policies and estimate costs — and returns on investments — even though there's not yet a lot of data to define success.

"There's a fair amount of learning going on based on early adopters," Young says.

The number of companies that have made a significant commitment to blog technology is limited, according to Forrester. It found in a June 2007 survey of IT decision-makers at US companies with 500 or more employees that only 7% have made large, strategic investments in blogs. Another 20% have made small scale implementations, with 12% piloting blogs and 15% considering them.

Calculating exact costs for corporate blogs is difficult. But based on multiple accounts, those costs aren't significant.

"I can do it for zero cost in almost zero time," says Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner. Open-source platforms guarantee a cheap option but can result in unauthorised blogs floating around the corporate infrastructure, with attendant IT headaches.

IT departments are more likely to turn to corporate applications, opting for either hosted services or commercial products designed to meet corporate requirements for security, permissions and scalability.

"IT does not like the idea of people in departments or lines of business downloading software whether it costs or it's free. They want to manage it," Valdes says.

In addition to vendors that specialise in providing corporate social media applications, Valdes says the major players in the corporate collaboration software space either have or will ship products that include blog capability and other Web 2.0 technology.

Blogging technology, like email systems, doesn't require heavy maintenance. "IT will obviously operate the machinery behind blogs just [as it does] the machinery behind email, but it's a relatively minimal effort," Valdes says.

Corporate-hosted blogs that operate behind company firewalls, Valdes notes, enjoy a certain level of security. Moreover, the blogs can be structured to meet specific corporate requirements: IT can prohibit anonymous postings, restrict who can read certain blogs and even determine who has read a particular blog and when.

Whether such restrictions and insights clash with the free-spirited nature of blogs is a matter of opinion, but such abilities certainly give IT the kind of control that makes for easier management.

"There's a lot of debate around that — the amount of governance and control you should have over it," says Jim Johnson, lead technology strategist at Xerox. The IT department there supports some 50-60 blogs, using a mix of commercial products and open-source technology, Johnson says.

Xerox allows all workers access to blogs, but Johnson says the company is looking at whether there should be tighter restrictions and security to accommodate proposed blogs that might contain sensitive and confidential information. Xerox is also looking to expand its use of blogs so that all employees can set up their own blog starting next year.

This sounds like a large investment, but Johnson says it's relatively small. Without disclosing actual figures, he says the costs associated with searching and storage are "trivial" compared to the information that blogs can capture.

Others are already seeing worthwhile returns.

Frank D'Agnese, president of environmental consulting firm Earth Knowledge, has been using blogs for about a year to serve clients in the environmental science space. D'Agnese says the low cost of blogs, along with their ease of use and ability to contain all kinds of data in one place, makes this technology an optimal choice.

For example, Earth Knowledge is creating blogs for the Central Nevada Regional Water Authority, allowing officials from half a dozen rural counties to easily and quickly share crucial data without having to drive to meetings.

"We had people who said, 'I know that stuff is all out there, but who has the time to get in and link it in?' But we're getting the recipe on how to bring it all in in real time," D'Agnese says.

As a result, Nevada officials have been able to reallocate the days they used to spend driving every week to more productive endeavours, D'Agnese says.

But such successes shouldn't imply that there aren't challenges and potential big costs associated with blogs.

"From a technology standpoint, blogs are easy to implement. The major cost comes [from] using them properly and having employees use them properly," Forrester's Young says. For instance, managers may fear employees will use blogs as their own personal diaries. "But if a company is worried about employees wasting time, that's an HR issue, not a technology one. Companies need to define what they want from their blogs."

Hotel chain Marriott International is doing that now, with its IT team partnering with the business units already using blogs to help determine the actual costs and the return on investment.

Marriott first had an externally accessible blog owned by its CEO — a blog that was successful enough to prompt the company this year to pilot three blogs to serve three distinct business areas, says Eric Scholz, editor and chief of Intranet Marriott Global Source, Marriott's intranet.

Karla Gill, information resources vice president for enterprise end-user workplace solutions, says the hotel chain opted for a hosted application from Awareness, an on-demand social media platform company.

"Because this is a new and emerging area and we still have lots to learn, we thought this would be an easier entry point," Gill says, although she declines to release how much Marriott pays for its services.

Gill says her team worked with other business departments to craft objectives and goals for the blogs, such as "engaging the associate community in new and more dynamic ways". She says they're also using the pilot programme to better understand the features and functionalities of the technology.

When the pilot ends later this year, Marriott plans to look at statistical trends — everything from number of unique visitors to the number of readers per blog post — to help determine whether the time and money spent proved valuable.

"We've given ourselves an opportunity to explore whether this has value for the enterprise," Gill says.

Still, Gartner's Valdes cautions again investing too much in blogging. Moreover, he says, companies that invest only in blogs won't be successful.

"Blogs are only one part of it. By themselves, they're not going to necessarily make a big impact because it's just one tool. There are also wikis, social forums and portals, and other communication and collaboration tools," he says. "And companies that can make effective use of the full repertoire of tools will have an edge over competitors."