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…

Twitter, Twitter, Everywhere!!

Since Jaha stated in her blog late last night that she wanted to focus on Twitter for Thursday night's discussion, I did some quick searching this morning and came up with a few tidbits that might help:

http://www.newschannel5.com/Global/story.asp?S=7065041
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2007/09/18/the-great-twitter-experiment
http://www.adrants.com/2007/09/myspace-no-wait-twitter-no-wait-second-li.php
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/09/facebook_could_1.html
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2007/09/24/analysis-8-unique-reasons-people-like-twitter-and-why-microblogging-matters
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/09/24/twitter-etiquette-twitterquette

Hope these help...

Free Language Training on the web...

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My Second Twitter Life??

Second Life plus Twitter for enterprise? by ZDNet's Dennis Howlett -- At the end of last week, I attended a Second Life event organised by Metaversed. ‘Second Life? That’s so 2006,’ I hear the Facebook crowd squak. It may be old hat to some but enterprise players like Sun, Xerox, SAP and Amazon think enough of it that they, along with about 60 0thers turned up [...]

Penn State Great Valley....

Wow! Two posts in one day! Aren't you lucky?? :)

Anyway, I thought of adding this to the last post, but it was already (too) long enough as it was, so I thought I'd post a quick update on my other Penn State project this semester. As I noted in an earlier post, I have decided to work on developing a mechanism (process/technology) that will allow Penn State Great Valley Students to become more active as a community in light of the fact that we are adult students and have, for the most part, full time careers and family obligations in addition to our class work. Since, because of our other obligations, most of us generally only spend the six hours of week of class time on campus, I think that finding the appropriate technology to go along with the process that's developed is going to be key since it will allow students to interact (I hope) without physically being on campus. I'm not sure that Second Life is going to work in its current state, but there are a number of other possibilities such as Facebook or even using services from Penn State (did anyone see that this is coming: Penn State Blogs).

This is a work in progress, obviously, and I've just finished (last night, if Dr. J is reading this) the proposal paper for SYSEN 554. I may try to bring it up at the Faculty Senate meeting tomorrow if Dr. J thinks it's ready so we can start gathering volunteers from all of the divisions at GV to start looking at what the process might look like...

Thoughts? Ideas? Hit the comments...

Gotta Rant...

I know this is a blog for school, but I'm in the mood to rant today...

[rant]What happened to the Eagles? How did we let Jeff Garcia go? Mcnabb isn't quite (or maybe not even close to being) 100% healthy, we go out and draft a rookie QB who may be good, but that'll take a couple of years and we let go a QB who could have played well, got us wins and kept the drive for the playoffs going while Donovan recovers. Ugh. Seriously, though, with Donovan coming back early, is that going to push back the point when he is 100%? Can we afford to wait? I hope the team turns it around, but I'm doubtful at this point - the schedule no longer looks good and we'll be lucky, I think, to get to 8 wins this year. At least, the defense can stop the run this year, but now we can't stop the pass. The only bright spot to last nights game? The fact that there was a muffed punt and it wasn't the Eagles that dropped the ball...Thank goodness (now no. 10) Penn State is winning so I have one team to be glad to root for!! [/rant]

Alright, now that that's off my chest. I found an interesting resource (wiki) for Second Life information here: http://slbusinesscommunicators.pbwiki.com/ that's focused on the business communicators, but may provide some interesting insight into how SL's being used (check out some of the information on the non-profits in SL....Can't access the library information today at Penn State, but once I can, I really want to dive into uses of SL in business - I've seen a couple of IT blogs talking about companies like Cisco and IBM using SL to provide 3D virtualization models of objects for their customers. One blog even said that what Webex is doing for PowerPoint (2D presentations), SL is doing for 3D representations. All LindenLab has to do is work out the bugs (and there are a lot of them, from my experience so far).

While I'm on the topic of SL, when is everyone from the class going in? Since I haven't had a lot of time to explore, I've pretty much kept to the Penn State Island, but no one is ever around. Guess I should look into adding everyone from class to my friends list to better see who's around and when....

This came across my twitter this morning (though, it doesn't really have me all "atwitter" - sorry, couldn't help it): MTV is resurrecting the Pop-up videos for mobile phone distribution: http://tinyurl.com/ytmzdb. Is anyone using their cell phones to actually call anyone anymore (I have to admit, I spend more time on my phone checking my gmail account and trying to get my fantasy football scores when I'm not at home...).

And (also thanks to Stevie and twitter), if you're a Monty Python fan (No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!!!), check out: http://tinyurl.com/3bfrzk

That's it for now. Comments are open!!

Been a long week...

I have class again tonight, and it's been a long week. I attended the Penn State Faculty Senate meeting at University Park on Tuesday and still made it back in time for my Tuesday night class (SYSEN 554). I spent last night reading a case study for tonight's class and a paper for next Tuesday.

I have to write a project proposal paper this weekend for next Tuesday night. After my day at the Faculty Senate (feeling like a red-headed stepchild because I was the only student senator in the various meetings that I attended that wasn't a full time student in the University's systems), I think I have an idea for a project for that class which may even fit in, possibly, with the project for INSC 539 (which is the class I started this blog for). PSU Great Valley students are completely different than a majority of students at Penn State (even the other Graduate Students), with the exception of, maybe, the students at the Hershey Medical Center.

So, I'm thinking that my project for SYSEN 554 will be on the development of a process whereby the students at Great Valley can provide feedback to the Faculty of Great Valley (through the Faculty Senate and the the student senators), and the University as a whole, keeping in mind the fact that they have lives and careers and families outside of school, and typically probably don't spend more than 6 hours a week on campus (unless they're taking more than one class). I can use the project (I hope) for INSC 539 to develop or look at newer technologies (blogs, facebook, etc) that might be able to act as a mechanism for enabling the feedback process and get Great Valley students more involved on campus and be informed about what's going on at the University as a whole and Great Valley in general..

Thoughts - just hit the comments...

Jim

New Blog, Second Life, and other details

Okay, I've created this blog, so now it's time to see what we can do with it. This blog is a class requirement for one of my classes, so if it starts to seem weird, it's because I don't know where this is heading yet.

Another requirement for the class was to set up an avatar on Second Life (www.secondlife.com) and mine is now known as MasterPo Kungfu (since the whole class needed to use the Kungfu last name). If you're on SecondLife, say hi, check out MasterPo and help him get his fashion style together (I'm still using the avatar's default set up...)

I'm working on my MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter accounts (also requirements for the class). and I'll keep everyone updated with how to reach me on those services once that's all set up.

By the way, if you've read this far, comments are enabled, so have at it.

Later.