The Trickle Down Effect of Blogs

Because markets are messy and changing faster than businesses... We provide Ideascape - a tool for enterprise blogging including bookmarking, forums, wikis, chat & other methods of idea discovery - which aligns employee wisdom with corporate strategy to create, innovate and adapt offerings before you miss the market and lose talent.

IBM Warns of Critical Talent Shortage posted by Jim Ware from The Future of Work Weblog, Jim says "The Talent War isn't really over, of course, it's just beginning. But it's clearly going to be a sellers' market, and organizations that don't figure out how to attract and retain the new "emergent workers" (Spherion Corporation's phrase) are going to be in deep doo-doo."

In another post, Tales from the Trenches by Charlie Granthamon, The Future of Work weblog "posts an archive of visionary articles he has co-authored with his business partner James Ware, a former faculty member of the Harvard Business School and a widely recognized expert on business leadership and staff development. They claim that organizations must become more aligned with the needs of an increasingly independent workforce in a global, networked economy."

Blogs in research: help for a speech, Stephen Baker from BusinessWeek - "The question I have is whether blogs help create the links between these various disciplines. The big breakthroughs will come from combinations from three worlds: digits, atoms and cells. So are blogs helping researchers (and financiers) bring these worlds together? I don't know, but I'm going to ask."

Yes, to Mr Baker's question, "...can blogs help create the links between these various disciplines". Ideascape is an enterprise blogging system and social networking application that delivers on open innovation, improving productivity, morale, and gets people to work together across boundaries. Corp IQ increases almost exponentially when blogs are tied together, share a common repository, and reach outside the business to services like technorati, delicious, et al.


One of the problems is that most bloggers are only familar with light-weight blogging tools that offer the basic functions of publishing for one person with in-line comments and a basic flat file structure for categories. As most of you know, some first hand since you're using Ideascape, the answers to Mr. Baker's questions can be found throughout our site. A good place to start:

Glossary of terms
Summary of the site
Ideascape
Ideascaping del.icio.us. (after you have read about it, click on the discovery tab on the top)

As more professional people use blogs to share their ideas, insights, and deep smarts; discovering and finding their information as well as putting it into a cohesive context (meshing-up with your own) takes on added urgency and importance.

Ch 6 Consultants Who Get It, by Shel Israel from Naked Conversations is actually chapter 6 in their upcoming book.

"Consultants are nearly always early in the business food chain to adopt technology change and adapt their businesses accordingly. They then take this new expertise and deliver it to other businesses... In short they are new technology enablers.

Consultants are important to blogging for two reasons:

(1) Those who blog are building reputations that make them category leaders, whether that category is defined by geography or niche, and
(2) Consultants are the experts who are now starting to bring blogging into other businesses. Consultants evangelized PCs, local computer networks and the Internet into business environments. They built up the Worldwide Web. In the case of blogging, we believe they will play key roles into a great many areas beyond two current stockpiles of technology and politics."

We know of many professional people that are not only consultants, but that blog on knowledgeable subjects from A to Z. Blogs will not replace a talented individual in any way but they can certainly help spread their knowledge across organizations to those unexpected areas/departments who can really use it. In a way, blogs will exponentially increase that consultants's worth as blogs can enable their knowledge to travel across and through organizations to find places where it will be used to develop ideas, products or processes that may not have been realized without that person's input.

What's more, blogs make ideas viral and distill information that becomes accessible to anyone (in a company). In contrast, using the consultant example, information or a plan is developed between a consultant and a VP or higher-up and a report is issued or maybe a plan is set into motion, but the essence is lost in translation as it gets filtered down to the masses. Blogs can take the information and carry it through to everyone in an organization, conversations can develop the idea, employees can bat it around until the essence of it is understood clearly by all people, all employees. What started out as a complex theory becomes clarified by the people who will be carrying it out; it becomes part of the organization's mission - it is clarified, digested, understood by all.