An enterprise blogging solution can be used to help build the structured platform required for an environment that supports emergent innovation.

This essay began with the promise of providing practical steps for how to bake innovation into your organization’s DNA.

The purpose of this section is to tell you specifically how to set up an enterprise blogging solution to achieve that goal.

What follows is a description of how a larger organization could make use of blogs. Large is relative, but generally it is an organization where no one person knows every other knowledge worker in the organization. In “Tipping Point” Macolm Gladwell suggests 150 people as rules of thumb for the largest number of people in a group, where people can be expected to know everyone else. Certainly, when group numbers 500 or more, it is time to start thinking about how to better facilitate internal communication.

What are blogs?

If you are reading this on the web, my guess is you already know. However, not every business executive is familiar with them, so here's an explanaiton.

Blogs are simple web pages, just like the web pages that have been around since the web was invented in 1993. The only new thing about blogs compared with traditional web pages is that it is much easier to create and edit a blog. Blogs are created and edited using simple web based forms. To edit a blog, the author of a blog fills in a form that looks just like the form used to type out an email on Google mail, Yahoo mail or Hotmail. Instead of hitting “send”, blog authors hits “post”. Everything typed is then posted on the blog.

How can an enterprise blogging solution become a structured platform that will support innovation?

First, it is important to recognize that most enterprise blogging solutions will only be used to facilitate internal communication. However, much can be learnt from how and where blogs have been useful on the public internet. The key to most successful blogs is focus. On the public internet, the most useful blog, or at least the ones that generate the most traffic, focus on specific topics. For example, they focus on a particular political view or on Julia Child’s recipes.

The same will be true for successful enterprise level blogs. Thus, you will need to design a series of types of blogs that focus on narrow topics.

Every enterprise blogging solution should begin with a Bio Blog. Every person in your organization would be expected to create one. The blog should serve as a fast summary of who that person is, what they are responsible for, what experience they have, what skills they bring to the table, what area of the organization they work in, who they report to, and what cross silo projects they currently working on. In some organizations, it will make sense to add to this with a list of the clients they are working with, or maybe a list of suppliers they work with.

Below is an example of what a Bio Blog might look like inside a consulting firm.

It is very simple and very powerful.

The only catch is that you have to design it in a way that encourages people to actually use it and keep it updated. In a consulting firm, that’s fairly easy do. Bios are used in sales presentations to potential clients. The normal course of business will compel users to keep their Bios updated. If your Bio is out of date, you’ll be asked to update it for the next time you are included in a sales pitch. Beyond this, consultants are motivated to keep their bios up to date out of pride and a desire to maintain a high profile. The better your bio looks, the more likely that you will be selected for interesting and challenging projects. And, the more likely that you will be promoted during the annual round-table review process. In the world of consulting, Bios can be used as a reputation management tool. Motivation by Reputation can be a powerful management tool. Consultants understand Donald Trump’s point, “No one will know about your success unless you tell them.” Consultants refer to them as “quals”; short for “qualifications”. The likelihood that a potential client will want to hire a given team increases in direct proportion to the number and quality of “quals” a team can present during the selection process.

In a more static environment, such as a bank or a software development, it might first appear to be much tougher. How often will people really update their Bios? One could imagine requiring that the Bios be part of the annual review process. However, if you have managed to sow the seeds of a truly emergent environment, people should quickly start to take the pride in the quality of their Bios. The same virtuous cycle that takes place in a consulting firm can then take hold. It should only require two simple steps from management: publicly recognizing people for highlights in their Bios, and more importantly, letting people know about innovation success stories that began with innovation creators finding out how they can help each other through searches across the Bios.

The barriers to actually using and updating any blog are low. A typical input form is shown below. It should require little training to teach people how to use the system. The rest of the innovation platform’s structure extends from the Bio blogs. Again using a consulting firm as an example, the following collection of types of blogs could be set up:

In this environment, users clearly understand exactly how to work within each blog. And the process for generating innovation using this structured environment becomes self evident. In consulting, most innovation comes in three main forms:

1. Developing new services to provide to clients
   1. New technologies, regulations or market opportunities – Explored in Expert Pages
   2. Descriptions of problems clients are trying to solve – Discussed in Client Blogs
   3. Ideas for new service offerings – Defined in new Product Blogs
2. Identifying new clients that might be interested in existing services
1. Ideas for new target clients – Discussed in Practice Blogs or in New Client Blogs
2. Ideas for how to tailor existing products to new clients - Defined in Product Blogs
3. Reducing costs by increasing partner leverage ( ie ways for each team to deliver more )
1. Making the sales process more efficient – Leverage existing sales tools in Product Blogs
2. Making the resource allocation process more efficient – Leverage search tool & Bio Blogs
3. Delivering solutions to clients more efficiently
• Leverage tools used to deliver similar solutions – Product Blogs & Engagement Blogs
• Find subject matter experts more efficiently – Leverage search tool & Bio Blogs
• Efficiently stay up-to-date on specialized topics – Expert Page Blogs

When these tools are combined, the overall structure is very similar to the structure used by the open-source community to develop innovative software solutions.

The importance of a powerful search tool to bring it all together – The 411 site

Once the basic blog types are setup, it will also be critical to realize that, just as Wikipedia is usually used for research, rather than a content creation tool, the people in your organization will generally use the full collection of your enterprise blogs will generally to learn about clients, products, new developments, etc. This means that their first stop will not be blog. Instead, their first stop will usually be a search page.

To make this innovation platform successful, it is critical that you add a capable enterprise search solution to your enterprise blog server. The search page has to provide an obvious starting point and it has to be easy to use. I recommend you draw your inspiration from Google for the user experience. Google has more than 50% of the search market. If you want, you can also use Google to provide the search technology. Google sells a series of enterprise search tools, including a very inexpensive tool called the Google Mini. The beauty of the Google mini is that it gives you all the power of a Google search tool, while it remains safely within your firewall.

The importance of leveraging work flows and all work done

To make your innovation platform a success, it is critical, that you structure the blogs to leverage inevitable workflows, where possible. If your organization ends up running a wide range of disparate projects, create “Project Blogs”. If the success of your business depends upon successful relations with your suppliers, create “Supplier Blogs”.

It is also important to make it easy for people to work with the Enterprise blogs. The best blogging tools now enable you to email your latest postings directly into the blog. For some users, using a familiar email interface as a transition tool into the world of blogging will be the critical element of simplicity they require before they start to use the blogging system extensively.

It is just as important to create as many ways for people to derive value from the blogs as possible. For example, senior executives might want to be able to see what is going on across multiple projects. The best enterprise blogging tools can handle this with ease using a technology called Real Simple Syndication.

One way to create both simplicity and add more value is to store additional information as the blogs are created. For example, store a list of the projects a person works on, or the number of expert pages they create. This information can be stored in a descriptive data file that sits behind the blogs. Technically, they are XML based meta files.

A second way to add value is to make sure that blogs are automatically updated with relevant information. For example, when a person is added to a project team, this should automatically show up in their Bio Blog. As much as possible, reduce the burden of maintaining information in the system.

Selecting an Enterprise Blogging Platform

Business leaders need to be concerned about a few aspects of the enterprise blogging server. To meet your goal of creating a platform to support innovation, your enterprise blogging server requires the following elements:

1. To fit your organization, the enterprise blogging solution has to be customizable.

   This means that each of the types of blogs have to be customizable. You should be able to create your own templates for each type of blog. A Bio blog in a bank should not look exactly like a bio blog in a consulting firm. Consulting firms need client blogs. Manufacturing firms need supplier blogs.

3. To accommodate innovation, it should have a modular design that allows for “plug-ins”

   You goal is to create innovation. That means, if you succeed, your organization is inevitably going to change. To accommodate this growth your systems need to be able to evolve. The only way to allow for this kind of change in a software environment is to build modular systems. Think of it like Lego bricks. One day you can build a car. The next day, you can add a few pieces, maybe change the tires, and you have a truck. A modular enterprise blogging system that has a successful track record of integrating a wide range of “plug-ins” will give you a platform that can grow and evolve as the pace of innovation and change increases.

As I am writing this (in December 2005), a blogging server called MovableType, made by a company called SixApart is the only solution I know of that is capable of delivering on these two requirements.