Case Study: Blogs at DrKW

I thought I'd do something different for the case study this week and put my notes for the review questions (posted on Dr. Ahmad's blog) in my blog. In the interest of keeping the dialog open (perhaps even before class tomorrow night), feel free to comment...

Please read Blogs at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein case study for Thursday. When you read, think about the following questions:

1. Should Rangaswami (the CIO) initiate internal blogs within DrKW? If so, how? How about externally facing ones? Who, if anyone, should be encouraged to set up an external blog?

It seems that the CIO has already initiated the internal blogs and that they have been able to eliminate some of the silos in the bank through interaction via the internal blogs.

As for external blogs, this needs to be handled carefully. Accidentally (or perhaps even intentionally) publishing the wrong information on the external blog could be very damaging to the bank, not to mention hard to explain away if lawsuits were to result of the publication. I think, to bring the company into the external blogosphere slowly, and to give the Compliance organization some comfort, employees in departments of the bank that have already started blogging internally (and so have some experience) and who have an external facing position (public relations, sales, etc.) should be the first. As the blogs become successful, the program could be expanded to other areas of the bank. In order for this to be successful, though, clear policies and guidelines need to be established, along with training materials, such as the Sun Policy on Public Discourse – Exhibit 4 in the case study.

2. In what ways is the blogosphere chaotic? In what ways, if any, is it not?

The blogosphere is chaotic because everyone can write about any topic (the fact that I’m posting these notes from this case study on my blog is a prime example). However, you can aggregate feeds and only read the blogs or topics you’re interested in using a variety of tools such as RSS readers, and only look at the stuff you really want to see (especially if the RSS aggregator only shows you the headline or the first paragraph of the blog entry). I have gotten to the point where I can scan, using Google Reader, literally 100s of blog entries every day from a variety of sources – financial news, tech news, other interesting topics, friend’s blogs, and even the blogs from this class. Once you get used to it, it’s very easy to go through all the postings and click on the ones that you are interested in to read the whole post.


3. Imagine you were the CIO of DrKW. How might blogs be useful to you? To the managers and knowledge workers in your organization?

One of the problems I’ve seen at companies in the past, and especially in situations where there were historic departmental or divisional silos, is getting the company employees to a point to share the information among each other. A perfect example is spending months and a lot of time to build a knowledge management system for an IT Help Desk, but the people doing the support were loathe to share the information that they gathered over years (in some unfortunate way of keeping their jobs secure, or so they thought). So for DrKW, the blogs would be useful in freeing up this information that is currently being hoarded by some employees and making it available to everyone in the company. This could allow the employees to be more productive by not wasting time hunting down information that might be in an obscure location. For the same reason, I think that blogs would be very useful in my organization, but it would time a bit of time to implement to get the organization comfortable with the idea of that much transparency.

4. How can you trust blogs’ content? How can you ensure that what you read in a blog is accurate, authoritative, up to date, etc.?

You cannot trust the content of any blog (especially if you are not familiar with the blogger or are aware of their credentials - anyone can post on any subject, regardless of their expertise). However, you can use other sources to verify the information and if comments are enabled on the blog (and you read them) chances are that incorrect information will be identified quickly by the other readers that may have more information than the original poster.

5. How do you find what you’re looking for in the blogosphere?

Search the web (Google), comments and links posted in other blogs, there are million ways to access the millions of blogs on the internet…