This is part five of a series speculating on why all the excitement over blogs. In a very related idea to the rise of distributed markets covered in Part Five, MIT’s Tom Malone writes about the decentralization trends in business in The Future of Work. He sees the increased decentralization of business practices is made possible by the decreased cost of communication and transactions through the internet. This trend in business parallels a similar trend in government. It is taking a variety of forms and blogs can support many of these new approaches to business.
Larger organizations, such as IBM, SAP, and Microsoft use blogs to provide a more informal and personal connection with their customers, driving public relations down to the individual employee level. Small organizations are better empowered to reach new markets and remain viable, independent players as they achieve the global reach of large organizations. Inside organizations of all sizes, management layers are being reduced to gain greater efficiency and blogs can play a role here, also. For example, Tom Malone observes in The Future of Work that:
“When the teams need to exchange information, they often don’t need to involve managers at all. Instead, they communicate directly, either in face-to-face or electronically. In early 2003, Google, started using a system to keep Web Logs, or blogs, that chronicle their day-to-day activities, discoveries, and problems. Within weeks, the use of these online diaries had exploded. By reading blogs, the different teams could keep track of one another’s work and find issues they needed further discussion – with less need for top-down control by centralized managers.” (p. 41)
In a similar way, as I mentioned in my Portals Magazine article, IBM technical bloggers have also created diaries to communicate problem solving experiences immediately back to their team members while they are on the road. This reduces the need to management intervention to collect and covey best practices. Dan Gruen, Research Scientist at IBM’s Collaborative User Experience Group, points out that “these blogs can then be used to enable virtual apprenticeships and serve as a valuable resource for future teams facing the same issues.” The Hartford Financial Services Group selected blogs over e-mail for technical discussions so its field technology managers can then search past communications as they troubleshoot problems.
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