Succeeding in today's economy requires lighting-fast reflexes and the ability to communicate and collaborate across the globe.
Communicating and collaborating well does not have to drain your energy and creativity by spending extended hours engaging in regional and global telephone conferences and exchanging many email messages. Using new technology, like blogs, wisely can allow you to show and tell colleagues in other parts of the company and the world what you are working on without having to be present. Just allow yourself and your associates to shift your attention from supervision to collaboration over internal and external networks.
62% of Americans have no idea what a blog is. The answer: A frequently updated website consisting of personal observations and excerpts from other sources, typically run by a single person.
Jacob Crossman, a software engineer at Soar Technology Inc. in Ann Arbor, MI, uses blogging tools from Palo Alto, CA-based Socialtext Inc. to keep an up-to-date engineering notebook on his ideas about a particular project that can be accessed by other project participants.
"One of the disadvantages of a paper-based engineering notebook is that it's hard to find things unless you want to go through it manually," Crossman says. "So I decided to use the blog feature of Socialtext's software to keep track of my ideas. I would type them in, and then they're immediately searchable using another feature of the software." He is also able to link to other documents about the project using the blog entry.
Crossman is not alone. Weblogs, or blogs, which let anyone with an Internet browser and some easy-to-use software publish a personalized diary online, have emerged as a valuable knowledge management and communication tool in business and social networks.
Sources: ComputerWorld, Jan 26, 2004 and BusinessWeek, Jan 31, 2005 & October 3, 2005