Enterprise blogs cost $50K - so why aren’t there more?
Real enterprise blogging systems are not dirt cheap. They cost about $50K for 1,000 users to set up. And a further $50K a year to run. To make them really work, you need a full time internal champion, and you need on going support from management.
The system I designed for my firm was supposed to support 1,000 users. With a smaller initial roll-out, it would have cost around $50K, including software, hardware, etc. I talked this week to Robin Hopper, CEO of iUpload. For a basic set up, he said that was a reasonable number.
However, $50K is nothing for a big company. And it is especially nothing when considering the potential return from enterprise blogs and wikis in the form of improved internal communication and an increased pace of innovation.
So why aren’t their more enterprise blogs out there? Remeber that there are currently 50,000,000 Internet blogs being tracked by technorati. Clearly, the general public likes to use these tools to communicate. That in turn implies that knowledge workers would probably be happy to use them as tools to both get work done and capture that work communication in a form that can be leveraged through search and cross-links.
The big issue isn’t the $. It’s the politics of control.
Most large US companies are internally run like Soviet centralled planned
economies, complete with bureaucracies that fight for budget and
managers who try to control information. Six Sigma would make a
Soviet central planner go weak in the knees with joy and happiness.
Enterprise 2.0, with it’s decentralized exchange of information, with
it’s encouragement for internal entrepreneurs, and dynamic and ad hoc
solutions is anathema to these central planners. They recognize the
question “What if every employee could use a blog to communicate with
the whole company” as a threat.
Personally, I believe that power in most companies is expressed in only
one of two ways. As an executive, you either control people, or you
empower them. If you try to control permanently, you stay permanently
on the defensive. If you try to empower them, they owe, they will
work hard, but they will get up to no-good unless you lead with a clear
vision.
Most CEOs recognize that they can not do it all themselves. Thus, most CEOs
recognize that they need to foster an environment that encourages
internal entrepreneurs, fosters dialog, and reduces the inefficiencies
of large bureaucracies to a minimum. In other words, most CEOs try to empower.
Most mid level managers are secretly Soviet style central planners.
They try to control information. They limit access to information.
So naturally, they oppose enterprise blogs and wikis.
This is the only explanation I can come up with for the slow adoption of these simple and cheap tools within the enterprise. What do you think?
I think overall, blogging power (and collaboration software in general) are still widely unappreciated in the enterprise. Like most revolutions in the way we communicate, eventually, CEO’s will be embarrassed in a meeting by what they don’t know. Then, they’ll task someone to “figure this blogging thing out” and rush to deploy something. The mid level hacks will resist and not use this new tool fully, until they find others passing them up the corporate ladder who do. Then, they’ll catch on and it will become standard fare.
By the way, I’m a 6 Sigma Black Belt and I use collaboration software and blogging among my teams and projects to foster company wide understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish. The data and analyses are there for all to see. This reduces the myopic project team views that are the result of a very narrow project focus that ignores the “big picture”.
Having worked at some of the same places you have, Rod, I have to say you’ve nailed it on the head. Information is power and those who have don’t want to share.
I think a lot has to do with the fact that many people in the enterprise still think of MySpace or political blog sites when they hear the word Blogs and they probably don’t want to have thier employees reading about what Joe did over the weekend. I have directed folks to your posts about using Blogs internally in the past to give them clear examples of how it should be used in the enterprise. With Gartner’s nod to Web2.0 applications in the Enterprise recently, i think that those secretly Soviet style central planners will now be able to look at a magic quadrant - and say hey how about if we put a couple blogs together it will be cheap only 50K? Also, when the new workers start coming on board and demanding internal blogs as a workplace tool the adoption will sky rocket.
Could it be as simple as the fact that the value of blogging has not yet been demonstrated?
Sure everybody is making assumptions and inferences from the consumer world about how blogging can alter patterns of collaboration and communication. But the enterprise is different not least because in the enteprise apartheid system (where those who earn the money are regarded very differently from those who are regarded as simply spending it) the focus and pressure on enterprise IT is to deliver cost effective solutions.
If blogging fails it is IT who get the blame not those who who were using it. This builds in a lot of risk averse behaviour.
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