John Patrick on Weblogs in Business

This CIO Insight interview with John Patrick, former VP of Internet technology at IBM on Blogging in Business is one of the best on the subject yet. John gets bottom-up and translates it well for the the top. Read the whole thing.

"Knowledge management wasn't overhyped," says Patrick. "It was underdelivered. Blogs can potentially deliver the grassroots discussions and knowledge-sharing that top-down, corporate-sponsored efforts never could."

...The goal is to improve the leveraging of the expertise within the department and across the corporation...So where does blogging fit in? It's a way to energize the expertise from the bottom—in other words, to allow people who want to share, who are good at sharing, who know who the experts are, who talk to the experts or who may, in fact, be one of those experts, to participate more fully. We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that's going on. "Just ask Sally. She'll know." There's always a Sally, and those are the people who become the bloggers. And such people write a blog about, say, customer relationship management, and they're taking the time to find the experts and the links to leverage, to magnify what they're writing about. And from those links people can be led to information and see things in a context they might not have considered before...

There is a link to wiki.org in the resources section, but its broken and there is no mention of wikis in the interview. Guess that part of the story will have to get out another time.