Jonathan Schwartz, President of Sun Microsystems, on blogging in the corporation:
Schwartz: We had a pretty interesting change in our HR strategies at Sun recently. We allowed blogging for 100% of the workforce. If you’re not familiar with blogging it’s when you basically keep your diary online and talk to the world perpetually. There is no more distinction anymore between the Intranet and the Extranet. It’s just the Net. Traditionally, the people who spoke to the marketplace were the folks in communications or the key executives who were in power at the top. Now it’s the 32,000 employees of Sun.
Ultimately you have to govern by policy. We have to have a policy that says at Sun this is what’s appropriate to say on a blog versus this.
So I started my own blog. Now, think about Reg FD [a recent SEC rule requiring full and open disclosure of corporate data]. I had a long discussion with our general counsel. Either Reg FD mandates that I must have a blog, or it prohibits me from having a blog.
But if you’re no longer allowed to have private discussions of material issues, then at some point we’re all going to have to use a blog as a means of communicating and of managing. That changes the role of the senior executive. You’re not just a guy making decisions all day long; you’re now a part of the ecosystem in a community.
Read the complete text of Will Every Company Be Like eBay?
Five tech leaders weigh in on what developing technology means for corporations and workers.
Jul 30 2004
By David Kirkpatrick
Fortune.com; at Rob Paterson’s blog.
This type of corporate behaviour is a sign of the times. Many of my favourite bloggers are looking at new models for work in our internetworked age. Rob Paterson is teaching a UPEI course on the New Economy, using Natural Capitalism as the main text. Dave Pollard has been describing what a natural Enterprise should look like. Dave is also going to look at the Next Economy.
The Next Economy, whether that be a World of Ends Economy or a Support Economy, in which entrepreneurs will find and associate with each other to provide innovative, deeply valuable services to customers in a way that multinational corporations can never hope to match, depends utterly on the Internet providing us with a powerful means to find like minds and experts on anything under the sun. The bit of serendipity that I described above that allowed me to find Mark is a perfect example of how impossibly difficult that is with the tools, and shortage of knowledge, we struggle with today. The issues are:
1. How do we get people to post to the Internet (and keep up-to-date) sufficient information about themselves in an appropriate format to allow us to find them, easily, when we need them?
2. What kind of tool is needed to filter, qualify and leverage that information and (ideally, proactively and organically) connect us with like minds and needed experts, kind of a context-rich audited Yellow Pages of millions of people’s individual interests and expertise. We know that search engines and first-generation social networking tools aren’t up to the job. We need something completely different.
My own business is getting more networked every day and with every project. Being flexible, without “we can’t do that” constraints, I am able to quickly form teams from my growing network. Many in my network are also bloggers. How do we keep up to date? With blogs. It’s harder to keep in touch with my non-blogger partners though. What tools do we use? For now we use blogs for conversations and simple project management tools for client-based work – anything from eProject and Base Camp to ACollab and TasksPro. For connecting to others, I use my RSS aggregator. However, I’m finding that networking software, like Spoke, doesn’t address Question 2 above. I must say that it’s better than five years ago, when I used e-mail and some industrial-strength collaborative tools like Lotus Notes.
