CIO.com Article Promotes Internal Company Blogs

By Dennis D. McDonald

CIO.com's Seven Reasons for Your Company to Start an Internal Blog lists the following:

1. Your enterprise e-mail applications are not easy to search.
2. Your e-mail is lost in the eye of the “cc storm.”
3. Ex-employees can take it with them.
4. Too much wasted time checking in with colleagues.
5. With blogs, the humble and the egotist both win.
6. Organizational openness and accountability.
7. People might already be using them. 

I personally agree with much of the discussion in this article, especially with the  article's subheading:

Proponents say an in-house blog can be like a bulletin board, communication tool and culture enhancement. Plus, it's better than tracking projects by e-mail.

Nevertheless, my consulting as well as my own research (the interviewing I've done so far for my project blog survey and last year's Web 2.0 Management Survey) have uncovered corporate resistance to blogging that is based partially on ignorance, partially on misconceptions about what blogging is -- and partially on rational concerns about costs, effectiveness, security, and privacy.

I'm going to withhold judgement till I get a few more interviews under my belt.

Still, I have to agree with the CIO.com comment about the email, and about meetings as well. Blogs can be an easy to set up and manage tool to centralize pages and documents for discussion and review. They can also help to overcome some of the problems that arise when an organization relies heavily on difficult to convene meetings for information exchange.

Sometimes having just one individual miss a meeting can result in weeks of delay on an important project. Using  a blog as a repository for discussions and issues can mean that the person who missed the meeting doesn't have to wait days or weeks to get caught up.