Control Points
Stephen O’Grady: “Anyone that’s worked with enterprises around blogging has probably run into this. Having seen blogging discussed and occasionally embraced in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, enterprises are eager to be hip like Dr. Evil and jump on the blogging bandwagon. As long as they don’t lose control over who’s talking, what they’re talking about, and when they’re talking about it.”
The timing of this post is interesting as just over the past week or so there has been an ongoing conversation about control and trust within IBM’s intranet blogging system. Without going into details, there have been a couple of very isolated incidents where a blogger has been asked to remove a post from the system. These requests usually come from the bloggers direct management and tend to involve problematic situations where the manager does not believe that the post will help resolve whatever challenge the blogger happens to be ranting about. Despite the fact that there have been very few such incidents in the four years we’ve been running BlogCentral, many of the internal bloggers are bristling at the mere idea that others may have been asked to delete posts. The overwhelming consensus is that, unless a post is in clear violation of IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines, a post should never be deleted from the system. Further, any topic that does not violate those guidelines is generally considered fair game. There is no control over who can blog. There is no control over who can comment. And yes, there are a lot of people who get extremely nervous about that. There are, however, plenty of people who embrace it and absolutely love it.
I’ve often heard that a lot of other organizations are watching what IBM is doing and are shocked that we’ve been able to pull it off to the extent that we have. As of this moment we have blogs, wikis, podcasts, activities, social bookmarks, communities, fora, mashups, instant messaging, microblogging, profiles, social graphs, tagging, file sharing, reputation systems, etc… and while only a small fraction of IBMs global population are using these tools actively, we arguably have the largest enterprise social networking environment around. What’s amazing is the level of support we’re getting for these tools from The Top Down. The only issues we’ve had thus far have seemed to stem from deeper in the organization; and, again, those have been very isolated cases.
Stephen goes on to say, “Where Carl and I agree is that the conversation will at some point distill down to a question of trust, that most valuable of commodities. Where we break is on the enterprise capacity for trust. His solution sees a “huge dose of trust” as part of the equation, but I see little evidence to indicate that the average enterprise is willing to trust their average employee, and as such I suspect they’ll lock down Web 2.0 tools to the point of uselessness if given half a chance.”
I don’t know enough about the “average enterprise” to judge how willing they will be. What I can say, however, is that it does absolutely come down to a question of trust. My advice to CIO’s everywhere: Just Let It Happen; I think you’ll be surprised at the results.