Today, I am posting a pdf version of Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators.

The paper makes the business case for internal enterprise blogging within a large company.

You can find a full online version of the paper or download a pdf of the paper (948 KB) 38 pages

If you have any comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to email me. The link to my email address is available on the top right hand side of this page.

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The Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators essay began with the assertion that the only way most companies can generate a constant stream of significant profits is through constant innovation.

It has been shown that constant innovation can be achieved through a better understanding of emergent organizations, the role of innovation creators and the hurdles those innovation creators usually face. The tactical steps simply require a dedicated effort to minimizing those hurdles and building a structured platform to support innovation. One way to achieve that is through enterprise blogs.

It is interesting to note that people have been trying to develop these types of tools since folks at Xerox PARC invented the notion of an electronic office environment. Lotus Notes, Groove and Microsoft’s SharePoint Services have all taken a swing at the problem. They have failed because they focused on automating workflow, rather than empowering knowledge workers. It is ironic that so many software companies build, but don’t give their final clients the tools to build. The only exception has been Microsoft. With Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook, Microsoft gave knowledge workers tools that could be used to build tools for analysis and information distribution.
Enterprise blogging is the beginning of a new phase in knowledge worker empowerment. Today, enterprise communication is handled in either one of two ways. Either knowledge workers use Microsoft Office and a collection of disorganized communication tools such as phone and email, or knowledge workers are forced to adhere to a highly automated and tightly defined process in a customized system, such as the teller screens used in retail banks, or the trading software used on trading desks. The first option is flexible, but inefficient. The second option is inflexible, but highly efficient. Under the second option, innovation is almost impossible.

The innovation that is enterprise blogging, will change that range of options, providing something that is highly flexible and has the potential to be highly efficient.

Enterprise blogging is also something that is browser based. As such, it is a direct threat to Microsoft.
Imagine a world where you preferred to enter content into blogs because they looked better and because it meant the information would be more useful to your colleagues. Would you cease to use Word?

What if your company replaced virus prone Outlook with a powerful web based email tool like Google’s Gmail. If it was modular, the web based email tool could be extended to include a scheduling tool that was linked to people’s Bio blogs. The email tool could even be extended to provide a standardized interface for both writing emails and entering posts to your various blogs.

In this kind of innovative environment, what reason would companies have to continue using Microsoft Windows if most work was done through a web based interface that could just as easily be on an Apple box or a cheap Linux box running the Firefox browser?

Obviously, Microsoft will come back with something new; an innovation not yet imagined. Office Live is the begining of that effort.

Just like your organization, even Microsoft is forced to innovate constantly.

The simple question now is, what are you going to do to help your company turn your knowledge workers into innovation creators?

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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:

style='margin-left:29.4pt;border-collapse:collapse'>

Bio Blogs	Full description of each consultant’s skills and experience Maintained by the person described in the blog Links to the relevant practices, services, clients, engagements and expert pages that the consultant works on
Practice Blogs	style='font-size:8.0pt;line-height:110%'>Full description of each practice and the services offered by the practice Owned by the partners leading the practice - maintained by the whole team Links to the team members who work in the practice, relevant services, clients, and engagements pages
Client Blogs	Used to help coordinate the firm’s relationship with each client Owned by the relationship partners leading and maintained by the sales team Includes links to the team members who have worked with that client, and the relevant practice pages and engagements pages. May also include external news and information on the client.
Engagement Blogs	Used to coordinate and run each engagement and, when the engagement is finished, provide a full description of the engagement, with learning points to help with future projects. Owned by the partners leading the practice - maintained by the whole team Links to the team members who work in the practice, relevant services, clients, and engagements pages
Expert style='font-size:8.0pt;line-height:110%'> Page Blogs	Used like a combination of a Wiki topic page and place to track the latest on a specific topic Owned by a consultant or a group of consultants who are interested in the topic Examples might include a page on Credit Default Swaps, or Basel II, or Calypso’s derivatives trading system. Links to the team members who contribute to the page, and relevant services, clients, and engagements pages

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.

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If you are the CEO, the solution is relatively simple.

Step 1 – Communicate your goal of constant innovation to the whole company

This means telling your knowledge workers that, in addition to their current duties, you want them to become Innovation Creators.

This also means changing the way your knowledge workers are managed, giving them freedom to be innovation creators. Google Inc, for example, has taken the practical step of telling all its engineers to devote 20% of their time to a project of their choice.

Not every one of your knowledge workers will thrive in this new environment. Not all of them will have the drive to take the initiative, and work towards solving problems. Your organization will still see an improvement in innovation. Only a small percentage of people who use Linux or Wikipedia contribute. To encourage those people who might step up to the role of innovation creator, you will have to work hard to publicize the success of other innovation creators. People need to see examples they can be inspired by and examples they can emulate.

The biggest hurdle will come from your middle level managers. The managers who wrongly believe that they derive their power and success from controlling information and from micro managing will not thrive in this environment. Managers who deliberately or inadvertently limit their employees by reducing their sense of ownership and by limiting opportunities to grow will not thrive in this environment. You will need to find out who these managers are. You will need to identify the managers who stifle innovation. You have to figure out how to get them to change their ways. If they do not change, in a competitive environment that requires constant innovation, these managers cannot help you. Not every one of your lower level knowledge workers has to become an innovation creator, but every manager has to facilitate innovation creation.

Step 2 – Get rid of the 6 hurdles that innovation creators face

This means creating an environment that encourages innovation:

1. Create an environment where your innovation creators can find out know who is who
2. Create an environment where all your people know what is going on – your strategic objectives, your operational challenges, your competitive landscape and most importantly, your clients’ needs.
3. Wherever possible, give your innovation creators a sense of ownership. If they come up with a great idea, let the whole organization know who came up with the idea. If they propose an initiative, and successfully make the business case to pursue that initiative, find ways to let them run the initiative.
4. Create an environment of reciprocal altruism. Work out ways to give innovation creators acknowledgement for their efforts. Work out ways to give them an incentive to reach beyond their defined roles. Most importantly, give them the power and the confidence to take risks. Giving every member of your team access to tools that publicly display their contributions to the group effort is one way to create an environment that supports reciprocal altruism.
5. Create an environment that encourages dialog and feedback. People in every stage of the production process, or people in every area of a comprehensive service offering must be able to provide direct feedback to each other. In addition, every area of your organization must be able to hear customer or client feedback, loudly and clearly. Innovation is something new that people will actually pay for. Without direct market feedback, innovation that generates a new stream of profits will not happen. In order for an organization to be truly innovative and exhibit emergent intelligence, it must have a system that facilitates feedback.
6. Prime your organization to accept constant innovation: Fostering trust and positive cultural attitudes towards Maverick innovators are necessary requirements for creating an emergent organization that generates constant innovation.

Step 3 – Design a structured platform to supports innovation

After lowering the innovation creator’s 6 big hurdles, you will need to create a structured platform to support that innovation.

In order to accomplish this, you will have to address some Human Resource issues, such as how people are compensated, how they are promoted, and what incentives senior managers have to work with other parts of your organization.

You will also have to deploy a new type of communication tool that does a better job of facilitating group communication than mass emails while simultaneously helping you achieve your goal of reducing the six hurdles. Luckily, for you, that technology has finally become available. As will be explained below, the best tool for the job is an enterprise blogging solution, custom designed for your business model and your business objectives.

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Yesterday, I wrote about Kathy Sierra’s interesting article: “BrainDeath by Micromanagement: The Zombie Function“.

It really is hard for some people to understand that micromanagement does not produce great results.

Down at the bottom of her article, there are a people showing resistance in the comments. For example Ed Borasky says this:

I’m reminded of the scientific catch phrase of “a beautiful theory murdered by a gang of brutal facts”.

Brutal fact number one: Most of us work in an organizational structure best described by the phrase “accountability hierarchy”. Those two words are important — people are *accountable* for their actions and business results, and the structure is *hierarchical*. Your boss is accountable to his or her boss for what you and your teammates say and do.

Brutal fact number two: The financial success of a business depends more on the *customers’* perceived quality of its products and services relative to the competition than it does on the way people inside the organization treat each other.
….

A “micromanaged” employee needs to understand that his or her boss is almost certainly accountable to a higher-up for business results. And an employee wishing to change something — anything — must demonstrate how it ultimately affects the perceptions of products and services by *external* customers, not *internal* ones.

Ed presents a reasoned argument, but his assumptions are flawed.

If you boil Ed’s argument down, he is saying that because employees do not understand the big picture, they have to be micromanaged. The big picture includes everything management is accountable for and everything that external clients care about.

The flaw in the logic is Ed’s assumption that employees can’t understand the big picture, and never will understand the big picture.

In my paper, Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators, I outline the Characteristics of an Environment that Fosters Innovation Creators. The first two are:

1. Innovation creators need to know who is who: This problem plays itself out in most large organizations. Solving the tactical problem of “who is who” is critical to creating an environment that generates innovation.
2. Innovation creators need to know what is going on: Helping people know the big picture, the small details and preventing repeat research are critical tactical steps.

Innovation creators are employees who help execute because they want to help the company succeed. They get involved. They care.

They help the company succeed because senior management has taken the time to given them full information about the company’s constraints, its goals and its objectives.

An employee who is fully aware of business goals and external customer needs is an employee who can actually help achieve those goals.

Managers need to ask themselves do they want a team who helps them succeed on the playing field, or have they simply hired all those employees to be cheerleaders fetching water bottles, leaving the boss to do all the work.

The answer is obvious.

The next question becomes how do you efficiently engage and inform your whole team.

I believe the solution is to use Web Office technology, such as enterprise blogs and enterprise wikis.

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With blogs, it’s all about reputation management.

That was Kathleen Gilroy, CEO of the Otter Group. Her team is currently developing a Web Office solution for a major financial institution. Kathleen got in touch with me the other day after reading How Structured Blogging & Microformats will Help your Company Innovate.

We had a fantastic discussion, and I am certain I got more out of talking with Kathleen than she gained from talking with me. She has some amazing insights into how Web Office Technology will impact how successful companies are managed.

In a company that uses Web Office technology such as blogs and Wikis, people will be motivated to participate, contribute and add value by an acute need to manage their reputation.

People have asked me “Why will employees contribute to enterprise blogs and Wikis?” They will have to participate and contribute if they ever want to accomplish anything within the firm, and especially if they want to be seen to be contributing.

Peter Gloor begins his amazing new book “Swarm Creativity” with a perfect quote from Thomas Malone’s “The Future of Work” that echos this point.

As managers, we need to shift our thinking from command and control to coordinate and cultivate - the best way to gain power is to give it away.

This isn’t an easy thing to learn.

I was reminded of this today when I read a really great article by Kathy Sierra called “BrainDeath by Micromanagement: The Zombie Function“.

The more you use your reins, the less they’ll use their brains.

To paraphrase, if you want to get the least from your team, don’t give your people full information, don’t expect them to think out of the box, don’t appreciate it when they do think creatively and force them to only and mindlessly execute.

Instead, if you are the CEO and you want smart, capable, engaged and passionate employees, you have share with them. You have to share full information about your goals and your constraints. You have to turn them into partners who want to help you achieve your goals. You can motivate them financially. But year end bonuses only do so much. To engage them daily you have to make it personal. You have to make their contribution something that is assessed and appreciated by all their colleagues. You have to make it about their reputation.

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Under the category of interesting a worthwhile sites to check out, it is definitely worth taking a look at Bill Ives’ “Portals and KM” site. Many thanks to Peter Gloor for the introduction.

Bill has been blogging for a while, and with a background in Knowledge Management and psychology, he provides some interesting perspective.

For example, Bill provides a really interesting take on Blink vs. Wisdom of Crowds – Experts vs. the Multitude.

Talking about a Slate article that detailed an exchange between Malcom Gladwell and James Surowiecki, Bill says this:

I think both theories have their place and each counters a standard decision model. There are times when each view make sense but each can be pushed to absurdity. For example, Gladwell asks Surowiecki if a 1000 people in a village in China would be better at collectively looking at x-rays than a single highly trained radiologist. How about the 120 million Americans who believe in creationism re-writing our science curriculum? Or two dozen Democrats trying to swiftly guide the Kerry campaign? Perhaps John read Suroweicki’s Wisdom of Crowds before he picked his team. A similar critique of Blink is offered by Suroweicki as there are times when detailed analysis makes sense if time allows.

Just yesterday, Bill was kind enough to post his take on my Top 15 Requirements for Web Office article.

I want to respond to one of Bill’s questions:

Then he adds that we should provide a single interface for adding material and using all office applications such as email, blogs, and wikis. Good idea but does the functionality differences allow for this? I would not want to sink into the lowest common denominator.

Certainly, I think that email is the lowest common denominator. My take is that while my gMail account UI is a little nicer than my MovableType UI, but essentially the same. If I was using something like Zimbra, the only difference between writing an email and a blog post would be a couple of key words. Within an enterprise, things like accepting comments and trackbacks are set as a default to yes.

As I have mentioned before, I am leading the development of an enterprise blogging solution for my firm. We are starting early Beta testing in the New Year, with the potential of eventually rolling it out to 130,000 users.

With 130,000 users, you have to think about how people will learn to use the Web Office technology.

Some people will jump in with both feat, and start using the project blogs and the enterprise Wiki on day one.

Many others won’t. We have to create a culture that values the act of sharing information. People have to see that they are valued for their contributions. That is different from saying that their contributions are valued. If you are a CEO running a firm that wants to pursue a strategy of constant innovation, you have to enlist everyone who works for you, just a Google has every engineer devote 20% of their time to their own projects. That’s the reason Google keeps coming up with cool stuff.

The other barrier is training. In our case, we have very diverse group of 130,000 people with a range of skills and expertise. Not all of them are going to be familiar with blogging. Not all of them are going to have the time learn about blogging and wikis.

The alternative is simple. Let them use what they are already familiar with - enterprise email.

Every one of our enterprise blogs is going to have an internal email address. To post to a Project Blog, many users will simple email the blog.

If using email is one of the patterns, and companies are moving to software as a service, with the potential to have a beautiful, robust and secure Web based email client, like gMail, Yahoo!Mail or Zimbra, then a unified Web Office interface is almost inevitable.

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In all of the examples given above, innovation was baked into an organization’s culture because that organization had taken steps to address the six big hurdles faced by innovation creators.

But, in each one of these examples, the organizations took an extra critical step towards guaranteeing that innovation would actually happen. After addressing the innovation creator’s 6 big hurdles, they also went one better by creating a structured platform to support that innovation.

• Army’s OPFOR used their highly structured way of communicating military strategy called the “operational orders”, combined with specifically delegating the responsibility of achieving tactical goals down commanders in the field.
• Consulting firms use a network of partners.
• Derivatives community uses academic journals and industry associations.
• Open-source software has the structure of SourceForge and related web sites
• Wikipedia has an open taxonomy and a policy of letting anyone edit any article. However, Wikipedia does provide a structured platform. The structure comes in the form of the Wiki’s format. Specifically, Wikipedia forces contributors to write the entries in a very specific way, with titles, short descriptions, tables of content, links, etc. Wikipedia has set up further structure to help facilitate the creation of new articles. The tightly defined process begins with someone creating a “stub” for an entry. Wikipedia readers use the stubs to show each other where new articles could be added in the encyclopedia.

Thus, if you want to make an environment where innovation creators thrive, you must design a structured platform to support that innovation.

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Richard MacManus claims that Web 2.0 is dead, because as a marketing term it has been over-hyped.

Web 2.0 may or may not be a useful term, but the business need for Web Office is here to stay.

As readers of this site know, I am currently heading up a project to build an enterprise blogging solution at one of the big-4 audit/consulting firms. There are over 130,000 people in my firm.

Internal enterprise blogs, enterprise wikis and technology like microformats are going to radically change the way the people work.

Maybe Microsoft is going to dominate this space with Office Live. Maybe the rest of the industry (the former Web 2.0 crew) is going to beat them to the punch.

Innovation Creators, makes the simple business argument that in today’s hyper competitive environment, companies must pursue a strategy of constant innovation. If you are running a bank or a big manufacturing company, the idea of constant innovation is probably something fairly new to you. Compare the number of innovations that come out of Apple (iPod, iMac) to say the number that come out of Dell. Or compare the new pill bottles at Target to nothing new at the other drug stores. BTW, good marketing, great design and packaging are innovations, just as much as fancy new electronic or software wizardry.

If are the CEO of a big company and you want to pursue a strategy of constant innovation, you need to copy good innovators, like Google. Google enlists every engineer in the cause of innovating. I bet that Dell’s engineers do not spend 20% of their time on their own projects.

Recently, Business 2.0 asked Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt if Google has some kind of grand strategic plan for the new products it creates?

Dr. Schmidt replied “Virtually everything new seems to come from the 20 percent of their time engineers here are expected to spend on side projects. They certainly don’t come out of the management team.”

Google uses internal enterprise blogs and wikis to help their people to efficiently communicate.

A unified, easy to use system of enterprise blogs and wikis are the beginnings of what will become Web Office technology. Web Office will not look like MS Office. For one thing, there will be no Word Processors.

For a fast definition, Web Office is a set tools that enable Knowledge Workers to consume, create and efficiently share content, structured data and analysis.

I can tell you that I know what my firm wants and needs from Web Office. My article Top 15 Requirements for Web Office is a beginning, though I think I need to add microforamts to the list. I can also tell you that my main role is working as a consultant who deals with top financial institutions, including many of the top US banks and hedge funds. I can see that our clients want and need the same thing we do.

Finally, I can tell you that no vendor that I have seen actually has anything like the complete package of Web Office solutions we want and need to turn our knowledge workers into innovation creators.

Web 2.0 may be dead (as a useful marketing term), but Web Office has only just begun.

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Here’s a look a Structured Blogging in Movable Type.

Sometimes, these things just have to be seen to be understood. After you install the Plugins, your MT entry screen changes significantly. Under the current 1.0 vision, a user would begin a structured blogging session by selecting the type of entry they want to write. For example, a review or an event.

The list is already long, and bound to get longer. In my opinion it is too long. But as I explain below there is an easy way to fix this, and still allow for growth and flexibility.

What follows is an example of a structured blogging book review. Step one in the process is to select a review blog entry type. Step two, shown below, is to select the type of review, in this case a book review.

Now things get both interesting and onerous. The following is a shot of the full book review form that needs to be filled out.

While I am very excited about the idea of capturing Microformat information using blogging tools, the complexity of the process outlined above is a clear indication that more work still needs to be done.

Successful new technology leverages existing workflows and existing infrastructures. Embrace and expand, rather than replace. In this case, the “iPod” like simple answer is to make users feel like the structured elements are being inserted within existing posts. Just as I insert a picture, I could insert a Structured Blogging Microformat element. I outlined how this could work in my post on How Structured Blogging and Microformats can Help Your Company Innovate.

Diggable

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