Or perhaps rephrase the question: When should blogging be mandatory and when should it be voluntary?
Some organizations might integrate blogs within formal work practices and business processes so there may be situations when in fact, blogging is required. For instance, perhaps a company decides that competitive intelligence analysts should blog their personal insights about what they are seeing in the market (yes, it could be a wiki as well). Or suppose Utilization Management nurses are provided with a blog application as the preferred method of capturing notes while they interact with various health network providers. The examples may not be perfect but the point is that limiting blogs only to voluntary situations can limit their benefits. If you want to address the knowledge management aspects that people cite then I totally agree that conscripting people to blog is a bad idea. Some blogs and/or blog entries are best when informal and voluntarily created/posted. On the other hand, I can see situations that are more structured and integrated with project management situations, or certain process-related activities, where mandating blogs could work quite well.
When I discuss blogs and blogging with clients, I try to get across the notion of different types and categories of blogging patterns. Some might be more community-centric while others might be more formal and structured. There are certain situations when an informal solutions works best – and other situations where a more structured solution works well – especially as blogs evolve to expose its content in more granular and structured ways (e.g., microformants, Atom/AtomPub) that allow systems to extract needed data.
So don’t make blogging compulsory (especially if driven by the KM angle) unless it needs to be (when driven by the process angle).
At my panel on What Blogging Brings To Business at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, there was some discussion about whether a company should make blogging mandatory. I sense the audience and the panel thought it was a bad idea.
Mary Abraham of Above and Beyond KM calls it Knowledge Management Made Easier and points to a story by Tim Leberecht: The Writing Organization: Knowledge Management Made Easy. Mary seems to think mandatory blogging would be a good idea.
Dave Snowden points to a blog post from Stephen Holt [Mandatory employee blogs: one way to boost knowledge] which seeks to make blogging mandatory as a means of making tacit knowledge explicit. Dave's reaction:
"Aside from the perpetuation of the myth of tacit-explicit knowledge conversion (more on this tomorrow), the idea of compulsion flies in the face of all theory and practice in social computing. Its a classic; find something which is working, then ruin it by compulsion."
KM Space: Make Blogging Mandatory for Knowledge Management
