Weblogs winding their way into business nets

BOSTON - With his budget and staff slashed, Connecticut state CIO Rock Regan is looking to Weblogs as a key tool to keep his organization running.

"It is a critical function of our organization. It's going to be instrumental in our survival," Regan said at the ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies Conference last week.

Regan said his IT staff has shrunk from 1,200 to 900 people in the past six months - and he said he got only about seven hours of sleep last week as he tried to work with state legislators on IT funding issues.

So suddenly, the ability to capture knowledge about current problems and upcoming technologies and distribute it across a company quickly has become critical, he said. Weblogs let employees jot down notes and ideas on pages available across the corporation.

The first major Weblogging effort involves the state's "architectural review board," which consists of 40 people from nine segments of state government asked to come up with new network priorities. They are using Weblogs to capture and exchange notes and information.

"We desperately want to use [Weblogs] for project management," because the department, which serves 65 agencies, has so many projects that it could benefit from a shared knowledgebase, he said.

Regan said Weblogs are proving vital in breaking down bureaucratic walls. "My people in general don't communicate well on projects," he said.

As an example, IT staffers who focus on law-enforcement and social-services projects say they have "completely different" issues, even though the underlying core technologies they use are the same, he said. Weblogs are proving a way for employees to realize what they have in common.

He's using UserLand Software's Manila to give users Weblogs. Longer term, he said he needs to make sure whatever tools he uses can plug into the state's directory and authentication tools.

Paul Perry, director of Verizon Communications, said such issues are potential roadblocks to widespread Weblog adoption. Authentication is "a limiting factor to getting a community onboard right away," he said. Still, Perry said he found Weblogs a useful tool to keep track of the intersection of computing and communications.

Perry said he wanted faster, more technically in-depth information than he was getting in weekly competitive analysis reports from another department that consisted mainly of non-technical news clippings, many he was already familiar with. He said a number of like-minded employees were already using e-mail lists to forward interesting news. But e-mail has drawbacks, too: Not everybody is copied on every message, and once it's sent, "it's gone: I cannot search everybody's e-mail in-box to find out what was being talked about."

He said he bought 100 licenses for Traction Software's enterprise Weblog application. "I needed to get a tool that I could fit into the workflow of what everybody does," he said, adding Traction's integration with e-mail was key.

Perry said it took about four months to get his organization fully into blogging. He started with the people who he knew were always sending out information by e-mail; he spent a lot of time with them to show them how to use the tool. And he made sure to get his CIO onto the system - people "knew whatever they were highlighting would float up to the top."