dive into mark

John Robb: Knowledge management and desktop weblogs. My response (originally sent by email) is below. John Robb has already posted his counter-response. I still feel that, at best, he is downplaying the social problems involved; at worst, he is trying to solve social problems with technological solutions. That never works.

I agree with everything you say, in theory. I’ll bet the solution you outline works really well at Userland: a small, tight-knit, content-centric company. I agree that a desktop-based solution is the only thing that can technically scale well to a larger enterprise. But I’m afraid you’re ignoring the biggest problem, which is that it won’t socially scale well.

Problem #1: most people are not passionate about their work. They won’t voluntarily spend their own time writing a corporate weblog, and if the company forces them into it, then you’ll just get a bunch of crap as people try to fill their weblog quotas.

Problem #2: most companies don’t see the value of having people document anything, much less their daily thoughts. Mostly this is an ROI problem (or a perceived one). Writing good documentation is hard; writing a weblog that is worth the company time it takes to write it (remember, most people won’t write on their own time to benefit the company) is also hard.

Problem #3: most people are not good writers. They don’t enjoy writing, it intimidates them, it’s difficult and frustrating for a variety of reasons. English may not be their first language. This last problem is especially bad in development shops (at least the ones I’ve worked in), but it’s a problem everywhere.

Problem #4: people only have so much writing in them every day. Even the best writers have practical upper limits of how much good stuff they can write before they need to recharge. If somebody is a good writer, they’re probably not going to be using that energy for the benefit of the company; they probably have their own weblog out there that talks about stuff they really care about, or some other creative project outside the company’s control.

So you’re looking for people who are

• passionate about their work
• good at writing
• not spending their daily creative efforts elsewhere, and
• in a company that values those assets enough to let them do it on company time

I’m sure that Userland hires only these kinds of people, and I’m sure Userland is the kind of company that encourages you. Let me tell you: you’re the exception, both at the individual and corporate level.

My company has nothing like what you’re suggesting; they’re just one of those companies that sits around bemoaning the fact that “all that knowledge just walked out the door” every time somebody quits. We have a static intranet that nobody uses, except for installation instructions or new employee setup. To our credit, one of my co-workers read Scoble’s site and saw his article on whether intranets suck, and got inspired. We were considering putting something simple in place, but it quickly got derailed when my boss insisted on using Zope.

Meanwhile, I had my own personal weblog up for 2 weeks — count ‘em, 1, 2 — before my boss stumbled across it (because Dave Winer linked me for something). The next day I got a call from him asking me to take down the weblog, because there was some personal stuff on there that he found objectionable. My reaction to *that* is here.

And this leads to problem #5, the biggest and baddest of them all: most people, if they write well enough and often enough to be useful, will eventually write something that the company disagrees with. Either because it’s personal, or because it’s controversial within the company, or whatever. What then? Do you censor specific articles? Shut them down entirely? Give them a nice talking-to about being a “good, loyal, IBM-er-type team player”? That’s a quick way to lose good writers and hole up all that useful knowledge back in their heads (or worse, watch it run straight out the door to your competitors).

Apparently your company has solved this problem by adopting a more enlightened attitude towards their employees. Good for you. It sounds like a nice place to work. But in order to make your user-centric desktop-based knowledge management system work at my company (and, I’m afraid, most companies), you’ll need an entire company full of people who are

• passionate about their work
• good at writing
• not spending their daily creative efforts elsewhere
• willing to voluntarily censor themselves

Lots of luck.

Gloomily,
Mark Pilgrim

PS You are welcome to publish this email and/or the Write link on your site. Keep the conversation going.

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