The trials & tribulations of a business journaller proposes some issues in deploying the weblog as a business knowledge recording system, and goes on to list author-centric issues that inhibit the use of the weblog in the enterprise. The list is an interesting muse, but I wonder if it tells the most relevent part: Does the success depend on the author, or can it depend even more on the environment? Do business weblogs fizzle because the author loses interest, or because the author fears proceeding?

One of the comments on Matt's blog challenges the idea that people are lazy. Simon Forest writes

"People may be 'lazy' where they see no benefit for themselves, or aren't interested in their work or in writing about it. But while lazy in one area they're often busy in another. They don't stop writing because they're lazy but because they're doing something else. It's about motivation and interest and seeing the benefits (personal, social or organisational)."

Benefit for themselves is more important that we might think, and it is as much the postitive reinforcement of perceived value as it is negative "aversion conditioning" out of the power structures in the business ecology. Many years ago (1994) we created a primative business journaling system for a large government of Ontario installation; we had observed certain tensions between the three main groups of management, the labour unions and the government, but we unfortunately didn't pay them much mind.

Our system was initially a great success. People could report problems in the enterprise from malfunctioning equipment to ideas to improve the service flow, and they could post anonymously or not; reaction was enthusiastic, all sorts of org-oriented interest forums grew and talk abounded.

But the talk became political and spiralled into a flame fest. Now, this was 1994 when most people had very limited experience with computers let alone a forum or blog-like journal. What happened next took us by surprise: A senior manager launched a slander lawsuit against an anonymous poster, seizing logs until they could identify their "attacker". In retrospect, the comments were hardly damaging and in most usenet groups the attacker would have been dismissed as a cranky jerk, but in this politically charged government/labour/business context, the panic button was hit and the whole thing began to escalate.

This illustrates a problem more serious than any of those cited: In the personal blog space, we all have equal power, but in the business space, we do not. In the wilderness of the blog, I can criticize Cory or Doc, they could criticize me (if they knew I existed ;) and it's all taken with a grain of good fun and fair play, even where the warbloggers get bitter and vicious. No one has any control over anyone else, we all speak from a relatively safe distance.

In a business, this is not the case. A manager can have you fired for comments even, as Dive Into Mark notes (I think it was Mark), the simple admission that once-upon-a-time you had a problem.

Your subordinates also have the power to launch a grievance over anything you might do or say. At that same Gov't site, someone launched a grievance over my connecting the system to the Internet because that meant porn was now available on government computers! (which was true) Even our peers can leverage our posts to further their own ambitions.

This may seem cynical, but I think it's a very real concern for many of the cynically minded managers who are being approached to champion a weblog deployment. Unlike the wilderness personal-blog, in the business journal, "anything you say can and will be used against you" and the threat of that dark cloud is a serious implicit gag order.

We used to say in the context of mid-90's telework that managers should stop behaving like grammar-school teachers and adopt a leadership style more like graduate-school thesis advisors. Since that time, there have been pockets of progress, but overall, the world hasn't progressed; post 9-11 it may even be regressed. If the demise of once-prominent telework-advocate agencies (Telework America, Gil Gordon, ICT ...) is any indication, or even as judged by the increasingly cautious and restrictive job-descriptions we observe in Monster.ca listings, the scenario of management weilding power as a club or a whip is not waning, but may even be increasing.

As I wrote in the context of the b-blogs ...

"If only those companies so secure in their understanding of their product and so ready to accept and deal with whatever both their customers and their employees might say, isn't that company already well poised to succeed? What I mean to say is, would the appearance of an open and unfettered weblog be the cause of their success ... or just a symptom of it?"