Rock Regan, CIO of IT for the State of Connecticut says the Architectural Review Board is composed of 9 different groups. About 40 people are using blogs to capture information, discuss stuff, and make decisions. He wants to use blogs for project management. He wants to capture information by function, not by person. “It’s a critical element of organization.” The government’s motto is “I’m all for progress so long as there’s no change.” Moderator Phil Windley, former CIO of Utah, smiles.

Phil asks how the culture of blogging is affecting organizations. Bill Seitz says managers need to be aware of how their implicit power can “drive honesty underground” by being heavy-handed in how they deal with blogging. Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads says that blogs can make public what otherwise would be lost in email, improving corporate memory.

Paul Perry of Verizon created private spaces for people to post to as their own private journal. This helped ease them into blogging. “People need to be able to post and make mistakes.” And gain their own voice.

Bill finds that encourages structuring ideas into smaller chunks. It makes it easier for people to ask for further explanation.

Phil asks about blogging and KM. Paul Perry chose Tractions as his software because it tracks the links among the blogs. For Paul, KM is the ability to quickly find the best summary or set of ideas. In response to a question from Martin Roell, Paul explains that he allows people to modify the taxonomy of ideas he initiated.

Rather than expecting someone to write up a big report on, say, competitive analysis, Paul encourages people to blog their ideas. That way the report doesn’t go stale in two weeks.

(I had to take a phone call and missed the last ten minutes.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw