Why blogs will thrive in businesses

February 22nd, 2005

Dave Pollard about the use of weblogs for business and why they have a hard time being realized and accepted. What I found irritating in this post is that he only talks about outbound blogs, stating that they lack urgency as a raison d’etre in the world of business. He might be right but if blogs are understood as intranet tools and formats the are granted urgency.

Now since most businesses and particularily the people have troubles managing their info-administration overhead there is a need for something.
Dave Pollard mentions productivity and efficiency as movers and he is right on that. Businesses know that they need to care for that on an individual basis thus blogs and the like seem right there at the right time. Of course you need sponsorship and CEOs that understand that they need to support their employees - like good politicians- in order to benefit.

I think, however, that blogs will blossom behind firewalls - there is no alternative ‘though you need to intergrate them with other formats and functions.

How to Save the World: “So far it all comes down to bad timing (with the number of spectacular business failures, embarrassing leaks, disgraceful scandals, onerous new regulations and security challenges, this is not a great time to be proposing tools that enable a freer flow of business information), and Kotter 101: John Kotter in Leading Change explains that the two critical preconditions for a successful business change initiative are (1) a sense of urgency about a critical business problem and (2) executive sponsorship for the proposed solution.

Even if the timing of the explosion of the blogging phenomenon had been better, what is the great urgency for introducing blogs, yet another tool to send yet more content to people already overwhelmed by technology and information overload? What critical business problem are they solving? And what executive is going to sponsor and show the way, when most executives haven’t the time, skill or interest to go online at all?
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