Early next week IBM will introduce what could be the largest corporate blogging initiative so far, in a bid to encourage any of its 320,000 staff to become more active in online tech communities.Months in the making, IBM's formal blogging guidelines will be published on Monday. I suspect that 20 or more IBMers were involved in creating and reviewing those guidelines, in a very short (<20 day) time period. I'll write more about them -- and publish them in their entirety here -- on Monday morning.
The world's largest computer company has prepared a broad range of programs and online materials that staff can access to find out how they can start to blog. The move would help establish IBM's "thought leadership" in global IT markets.
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IBM used wiki, a simple technology that allows groups to collaborate on projects and share knowledge, to help produce the guidelines for its corporate bloggers.
Wikis are not as sophisticated as IBM's Notes collaborative software, but they are making some inroads into corporate departments where they sometimes displace the use of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for small applications.
Note that the SVW article has been updated since first publication.
Link: Silicon Valley Watcher: IBM is preparing to launch a massive corporate wide blogging initiative as it seeks to extend its expertise online >
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- 2
Andrew Pollack http://www.thenorth.com/apblog | 5/15/2005 8:47:45 AM
It will be interesting to see IBM's take on corproate blogging guidelines. Once we see that, it may be possible to comment on what kind of organization or categorization makes sense -- if any.
- 3
Axel Janssen | 5/15/2005 12:52:33 PM
Might be interesting. I click quite a lot on the refresh link of java blogs.
Some pointers about new stuff. Some fun stuff (bile blog). Some ideas. I read it very quickly. It influences my opinions. For ex. my junit testing sickness was influenced by the fact that a lot of bloggers propagated it.
Its like yellow press. Quick and shallow.
To learn & understand articles, books or/and IDE & me is better. It pays off that authors take time to elaborate the text and in the end one has to try for oneself.
But yellow press is good, too :-)
- 4
Wild Bill (for it is he - not some lame anonymous troller!) http://www.billbuchan.com/web.nsf/htdocs/BBUN693HVL.htm | 5/15/2005 1:50:57 PM
So - come on - are you promoting Blogsphere internally ?
:-)
--* Bill
- 5
Neil http://www.domino-guru.co.uk | 5/15/2005 2:29:03 PM
@ Bill.
It would be great to see IBM use Blogshere, or even build its own Domino based blog platform. Would really show people how important Domino is to IBM.
- 6
Axel Janssen | 5/15/2005 4:38:03 PM
@5: I believe that the outside world would show more respect towards IT, if those religious warfares would cool down a little. I mean. IBM uses a set of different technologies. Our customers aren't interested in such "show importance" stuff. They don't care if the IBM blogging software is created with Java, PHP, Python, Cobol or Lisp on Rails.
They want an IT infrastructure that works.
My sister is on the customer side and she complained about receiving offerings from IT-consultings like: "Java is dead. New thing is that stuff". "That stuff doesn't work. We do that".
I mean. Our customers are not like IT-industry. They just don't believe that crap anyway. They are much smarter.
- 7
Rock http://www.lotusgeek.com | 5/16/2005 8:10:36 AM
@6 - I actually agree with you, to an extent. I believe that as consultants and IT professionals we should promote the best solution that fits a customer's needs first - not go in knowing what technology you want to use, then shoehorn it in to fit the requirements. However, that being said I do think that companies make strategic long-term platform decisions, and those decisions are usually broken down by manufactuer/technology (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, LAMP, etc.). If the strategic decision has been made, then the consultant/IT professional should find technology solutions within the strategic direction that best fit the needs of the customer.
Now, to bring this back to the blogging point. I think it would be wise for IBM to offer a choice of blogging platforms - Workplace/Portal, Domino, etc. People can then choose a technology that either best suits their needs, or a technology that they are most comfortable with (or even a technology they want to become more familiar with).
Of course, I'm not at IBM - yet :) It will be interesting to see what I find out form the "other side" :)
--Rock
- 8
Neil http://www.domino-guru.co.uk | 5/16/2005 8:20:16 AM
@ 6
Only said it would be great, not saying that IBM has to use Domino, we all know there are blogging applications for just about every platform out there....
And to be honest Domino is probably not the best platform for blogging... I use it because I a Notes developer, but my friends use blogger. But as Domino is an IBM platform and is all about collaboration, it seemed quite a good fit.
Just thought it would be good for IBM to use an IBM technology.. I agree with Rocky.... offering a variety of platforms is a great idea, use the one you like best...
- 9
Chris Whisonant http://cwhisonant.blogspot.com | 5/16/2005 9:49:26 AM
Great to hear. Will there be a public site that we can search for IBM bloggers who may be blogging in a certain field?
- 10
David Bell | 5/16/2005 12:44:02 PM
@7 - While a variety of platforms would be nice to showcase, I doubt the IBM support folks really want to maintain a population of 320k bloggers in multiple environments.
They really, really like to try and have a single standard for all of these things. That's not to say that is always the case, e.g. there are lots of internal IM clients in use, but they too are being reigned in.
- 11
Richard Schwartz http://smokey.rhs.com/web/blog/poweroftheschwartz.nsf | 5/16/2005 6:30:46 PM
@9,8 There already is an IBM blogging site on DeveloperWorks { Link } But it's not really a matter of what "IBM" will use. The new initiatve encourages IBM employees to blog on their own -- speaking as themselves, not as the company. I doubt, therefore, that IBM will provide the platform for them on the IBM site. There are plenty of ways that IBMers can get their own blogs out there. Finding a host for Blogsphere is one possibility, but it's probably a lot more likely that IBMers would gravitate toward blogger, MT, etc., because they're more likely to have heard of them and there are a lot more hosting possibilities for them. I've made the offer over on my blog to help some IBMers get going with Blogsphere, arrange hosting, etc. I think it would be great if the Domino blogging community would jump on this bandwagon -- not because I think Blogsphere should be the preferred blogging tool for IBMers, but just so that we can make it known to IBMers that it is possible and not too difficult to do. Maybe a small number of IBMers will choose to use Blogsphere, just as some have already chosen to use the DX Domino blog template.
-rich
This sounds very exciting Ed. So far Microsoft has seemed to be on the leading edge of leveraging blogs. I would like to see a blog similar to Microsoft's Channel9.