Ed Yourdon on Fear Of Blogging

Ed Yourdon catalogs the fear that blogging can throw into the hearts of corporate executives:

[from The Yourdon Report � Blog Archive � What a Company’s Blogging Policy Says to its Employees]

I was in a business meeting a few days ago, listening to a senior executive present his company’s strategic plan for 2007. One of his goals is to establish a new and interesting division of the company as a “thought leader” in its market segment.

Even though it’s a somewhat fuzzy phrase, most of us would understand a “thought leader” to be a company whose ideas, opinions, analyses, and other expressions of “thought” are considered by its peers as being the most authoritative, credible, and pioneering in its industry. Intrigued by the identification of this goal, I asked the executive if he was planning any blogs or wikis to help create the overall image of a “thought leader.” He was a little puzzled at first, wondering if I meant that he should be blogging, or that his marketing department should create an official corporate blog.

“No, no, no,” I responded. “What I meant was: are you encouraging your employees to create lots of individual blogs, so they can be recognized in your industry as the people who, as individuals, are ‘thought leaders’?”

There was a moment’s hesitation, after which the executive said, “Oh. Well. Ummm … that’s an interesting idea. I guess we should think about that … but, you know — if we did something like that, we’d have to be very, very careful to make sure our employees didn’t … well, umm … you know … I mean, sometimes you have a bad apple who starts ranting and raving on his blog…”

I wasn’t surprised: it’s not the first time I’ve heard such a reaction, and it’s usually articulated in more-or-less the same terms. I heard it from a dozen or more participants in one of the workshop sessions at the Web 2.0 “summit conference” [actually, The Web 2.0 Summit] in San Francisco a few weeks ago; I heard it from a couple dozen IT and business managers at a Web 2.0 conference I conducted in Rome last month; and I’ve heard it from various managers in other gatherings around North America and Europe. These are all intelligent, hard-working, well-meaning individuals; they’re not Luddites, and they’re not stupid. But their reaction clearly indicates a common theme and consensus in today’s business world: corporate blogging is dangerous.

Ed goes on to enumerate the various facets of this thorny fear, like point 8., “The reason we require advance approval by all of these people is that we managers don’t really run our companies — our companies are actually controlled by our lawyers, our regulators, and the security experts.”

Ultimately, Ed offers no remedy to this really dead-on wet blanket list: there is no answer to these fears, short of embracing the unknown and moving on.

Cutter just published a report I wrote on blogging, called Social Media: A Revolution In The Making, and in the section where I briefly touch upon corporate blogging behind the firewall (or, dark blogs), I make this comment:

To the extent that corporations want to tap the collective intelligence latent in the organization, an internal blog network is likely to be one of the most effective and low-cost ways to do it.

However, if companies want to continues to "use techniques that they know, but don't work, instead of techniques they don't understand, that do," as Eric Bonabeau, of Icosystem, once said, then they will ignore the opportunities latent in dark blogs.

[Note in passing: Ed asked recetnly about the term dark blogs. To the best of my knowledge, Suw Charman was the first to use that term. Any antecedents? She also mentioned in a recent email that the term hasn't caught on widely, since it has a sort of negative connotation.]

tags: suw+charman, dark+blogs, ed+yourdon, corporate+blogging, fear+of+blogging, blogging, social+media, cutter, eric+bonabeau

Comments

[John Cass]

Stowe, I have some thoughts, but I wondered how you would combat this thinking?

[Victoria Visser]

Until recently I worked for a company that has deployed a dark blog and intially the fear of blogging was great both on the side of management as well as on the side of the employees but within a few month's time the benefits far outweighed the initial fears on both sides. It did take quite a bit of encouragement though from earlir adopters in the company. Taking the next step to allow employees to establish themselves es as credible professionals through their own blogs is probably still aways off but not out of reach!