A new study reveals that blogging on the corporate intranet may be rising dramatically. A Guidewire Group Market Cycle Survey, “Blogging in the Enterprise” (thanks to Shel Holtz for drawing attention to this) finds that 53% of respondent companies are already blogging and an additional 35% of respondents plan to begin corporate blogs within the next year.

While the survey is not a scientifically significant sample and should be taken with a great grain of salt (a very small sample of 140 respondents and the survey was self-select (voluntary) of tech magazine readers), the Guidewire study does provide some excellent insight into corporate blogging.

Key benefits cited by the Guidewire survey:

• Improved internal communications (77%)
• Replacement of other exiting work processes (41%)
• Replacement of email (39%)

An interesting note for the intranet watchers: of those companies that do use blogs, 91.4% have internal (intranet) communications blogs compared to 96.6% have external communications blogs. My, the gap is narrowing.

The big guys upstairs continue to be big users of the intranet blog. More than 40%

reported they have a CEO blog.

Here’s just some of the companies that I’ve wrote about as having intranet blogs:

• Disney
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Ziff Davis
• McDonald’s
• Siemens
• Intel
• Infoworld
• Oracle
• Many, many more

IBM alone has more than 4,500 registered blogs and is suspected of having more than 10,000 on the corporate intranet. IBM used a wiki to establish formal internal blogging policies using the employee populace to create and refine the policies on the wiki (the IBM intranet also features several hundred wikis).

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Blogging The Intranet

I’ve known a few battles between IT and Corporate Communications during my time as an intranet consultant. Both like to control, but both have different priorities and different views of the world.

However, IT and Communications must work together if you’re to have a successful intranet.

Here’s an interesting stat from a Forrester survey of 2,000 IT managers: 61% of surveyed managers feel the search engine is the area requiring the most improvement on the intranet.

In terms of dissatisfaction, only the IT Help Desk ranked lower than the intranet. Only 44% of managers say that it is easy to find information on the intranet.

I’ll bet a shiny quarter that this is one area that both communications and IT can agree: the intranet needs to be better.

There you go. All you need is a process which should begin with....

1)     Documenting the priorities and feedback of every intranet stakeholder (owner, contributor)

2)     Documenting the needs and preferences of employees

3)     Understanding and documenting intranet best practices

Once you’ve done the above, you can put together the plan that makes it happen... Check out The Nexus of Intranet Success for an overview on this process.

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Nexus of Intranet Success