Personal weblogs are an established medium of communication in the Internet. Like other forms of social media, they have been pushing into firewalled intranets of organisations for years. Potential benefits are supposed to be in the field of organisational knowledge management. The interdisciplinary thesis of Ehms tries to uncover how far these expectations are justified, if an organisational offer for blogging gets accepted by employees, what forms of use emerge, and what benefit is possible for the overall organisation.
Therefore this thesis analyses the business benefits of employee weblogs for organisational knowledge management from a theoretical and empirical perspective. It closes a gap in the current theoretical and empirical state of research. The multi-method approach of this work is based on case studies. It comprises literature review, discourse, ethnographic elements, qualitative data analysis of weblog contents, and guided interviews. The study covers the technical and socio-cultural context of the origination of the weblog platform inside Siemens AG, the efforts of communicating the initiative within the organisation, and the role of the author himself. The Siemens approach is compared to weblog initiatives of Microsoft, IBM, and other IT companies.
The goals, historical development, models, and the most prominent concepts of organisational knowledge management are outlined. Knowledge types are highlighted and knowledge processes are condensed in a minimalist model. Organisational knowledge work in increasingly individualised, computerised, and economised contexts serves as a discursive link to the concept of personal knowledge management. Within personal knowledge management, three strands of development are identified: (a) the technologically oriented "hypertext school", (b) the "activity school", oriented towards processes of information management as well as (c) the "pedagogical/psychological school" focusing primarily on questions concerned with individual goals and strategies. From these theoretical components an activity model is developed that serves as a basis for reflecting and reviewing technical and functional characteristics of weblogs.
On the basis of the current state of research on the phenomenon of blogging on the Internet different patterns and intensities of usage are identified and organised. Locating weblogs in relation to Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and social software movements creates a setting for discussing technology adoption by organisations and corporations. This discussion of various models of information- and communication technologies adoption in organisations suggests a focus on the reconstruction of individual blogging practices for the empirical part of the thesis. Ten individual case studies analyse in detail how intensely and to what end employees are using their weblogs. The analysis covers in particular personal motives, expected benefits, barriers experienced, and motives for abandoning the blogging practice. In terms of blogging practice, text length, number of pictures, hyperlinks, comments, and inter-connectedness are taken into account.
Use patterns are uncovered by comparing different cases. Five knowledge blogs are identified as an important form of blogging. Their activity profiles are analyzed again and linked to personal knowledge management. This enables an operational definition of knowledge blogs. The emergence of social networks and the variety of purposes of use are presented as the main results of this analysis. Finally, the patterns discovered are compared to characteristics and indicators of the overall organisational initiative.
With regard to this empirical underpinning, economic benefits of a modern knowledge management in general, and of personal employee weblogs in particular, are mapped to four overarching organisational goals (resilience, efficiency, flexibility and innovation capability). The specifics of the study, its potential for orientating the introduction of social software, and the implications of an expanding organisational coordination via internal networks are discussed. Aspects like complexity, self-organisation and selective attention in a world of abundance play a decisive role here.
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