Corporate Blogs and Wikis

I’m writ­ing an art­icle for the March issue of the Gil­bane Report on some of the uses of blogs and wikis in the cor­por­ate world. The Gil­bane report appears monthly and con­cen­trates on enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment and related issues at a man­age­ment level. It used to carry a fairly hefty sub­scrip­tion charge; since Janu­ary 2005 the art­icles are now all avail­able free of charge. I wrote an art­icle for the Gil­bane Report back in Octo­ber 2002; the curi­ous may wish to look at The Role of XML in Con­tent Man­age­ment.

As part of my research for this art­icle, I’d like to hear from any­one who can tell me more about what blogs and wikis really are be used for in the cor­por­ate world. I have enough inform­a­tion about PR aspects or, more gen­er­ally, out­ward-facing aspects of using blogs, but not enough real inform­a­tion about real com­pan­ies using blogs or wikis intern­ally. I asked about Using Blogs for Pro­ject Man­age­ment and got lots of “nice idea but we could­n’t quite get it to work” emails. I can think of lots of uses for blogs but what I’d like to be able to high­light are things that people in com­pan­ies are actu­ally find­ing use­ful, rather than nice ideas that might work. Ditto for wikis — they seem to have lots of poten­tial but is any­one real­ising that potential?

If you are using blogs and/or wikis in the cor­por­ate world (apart from for PR; I have lots of people to talk to about that), please let me know. You can send an email, or use the com­ment form on this site.

Note: when I write an art­icle of this form, I com­bine things that people are say­ing into my own inter­pret­a­tion. If I quote someone dir­ectly, they will be named with the quote. All sources are lis­ted in the acknow­ledge­ments. Once the art­icle is pub­lished, I’ll email all sources with the link to the art­icle, and I’ll blog it as well.