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Thursday, March 07, 2002 |
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Why Knowledge-Logs Cannot Succeed at Large Corporations: I want to be wrong about this. I hope I am wrong about this. I want somebody to shine a light on my darkness so that I can see a way for K-Logs and weblogs to make it in large corporations. I read John Robb's K-Log interview last night and this is my initial response. K-Logs will not be accepted within the walls of large corporations because the lawyers will not allow it. We live in a litigious society. Most corporations are also big litigation targets. That makes them extremely sensitive about any documents being published to places where any employee can get at them. That means they don't want just anybody writing pages on internal websites. This has been going on for several years now, but has gotten worse in just the last year. I suspect this is the fallout from legal cases such as Microsoft's where internal emails provided "smoking guns" for prosecuting attorneys. At our own company email is now automatically deleted after 90 days. Maybe it was done to save server space. I think it may have more to do with eliminating anything that could be used against the company in a court of law. Not that we are doing anything illegal. We just don't even want to present the opportunity for a communication to be taken out of context and construed as wrongdoing on our part. That is the company line and, to be honest, they are right to be concerned about being a target of litigation. It is the implemention of protections against potential litigation that I find so distasteful. K-Logs are going to be heavily frowned upon because they archive employee knowledge and make it so easy to search for and retrieve. It will be the first thing a prosecuting attorney subpoenas. No way lawyers are going to allow their employers to expose themselves to that kind of risk. I wish I were wrong. |
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Heard at a technical meeting: We asked for a meeting with a technician from our vendor of weblog analysis software, but we ended up with somebody else. We wanted to discuss ways of improving the robustness of our weblog analysis architecture. It was a phone conference and, from the remarks made, I am pretty sure the technician did not show up.
11:54:55 AM 
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