Weblogs in enterprise IT

With his budget and staff slashed, Connecticut state CIO Rock Regan is looking to Weblogs as a key tool to help keep his organization running.

"It is a critical function of our organization, it's going to be instrumental in our survival," Regan said at the ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies Conference today.

Regan said his IT staff has shrunk from 1,200 to 900 people in the past six months - and he said he got maybe seven hours of sleep last week as he tried to work with state legislators on IT funding issues.

So suddenly, the ability to capture knowledge about current problems and upcoming technologies and to distribute it across the enterprise quickly has become critical, he said. Also critical: improving communications in general.

"My people in general don't communicate well together on projects," and often create bureaucratic walls. As an example, IT staffers who focus on law-enforcement and social-services projects say they have "completely different" issues, even though the underlying core technologies are the same, he said.

The first major Weblogging effort involves the state's "architectural review board," which consists of 40 people from nine different segments of state government charged with coming up new networking priorities. They are using Weblogs to capture and exchange notes and information to help in their planning and decisions.

"We desperately want to use (Weblogs) for project management," because the department, which serves 65 state agencies, has so many different projects, many of which could benefit from a shared knowledgebase, he said.

He said he's currently using UserLand Software's Manila to give users Weblogs. Longer term, he said he needs to make sure whatever tools he uses can plug into the state's existing directory and authentication tools.

Paul Perry, director of Verizon Communications, said such issues are potential roadblocks in widespread Weblog adoption in an enterprise. Authentication in particular "is absolutely a limiting factor to getting a community onboard right away," he said. "E-mail and IM come automatically with an identity that you must have before you start using the tool. Blogging, you don't, at least not in the same way."

Still, Perry said he found Weblogs a useful tool to keep track of the intersection of computing and communications.

Perry said he was unhappy with the weekly "competitive analysis" reports he would get, because they consisted mainly of non-technical news clippings he already knew about. He said a number of like-minded employees were already using e-mail lists to forward interesting news. But e-mail has drawbacks, too: Not everybody is cc'ed on every message, and once it's sent, "it's gone: I cannot search everybody's e-mail inbox to find out what was being talked about."

"I needed the right technical people to highlight what they thought was important to me," he said. "And I wanted it daily."

He said he bought 100 licenses for Traction Software's enterprise Weblog application. "I needed to get a tool that I could fit into the workflow of what everybody does," he said, adding key is Traction's integration with e-mail.

Perry said it took three to four months to get his organization fully into blogging. He started with the people who knew were always sending out information by e-mail; he spent a lot of time with them to show them how to use the tool. And he made sure to get his CIO onto the system - people "knew whatever they were highlighting would float up to the top."

He added that, ideally, Weblogs will let somebody grab a blogger's collected thoughts on a topic, rather than making him go out and write a report on the topic.

Consultant Bill Seitz said Weblogs could eventually become almost searchable databases, via "parameterized" RSS feeds.

Regan said such "application Weblogs" would prove invaluable in such tasks as exchanging homeland-security information between state and local officials.