In our first post on the five types of corporate blogs, we described executive blogs and discussed their objectives and risks. Today we examine a very different beast – blogs written by subject matter experts.
Subject matter experts (SME’s) are those really clever, knowledgeable, articulate people that everyone in a company turns to for advice when they face a problem. They are also the people that senior management is terrified will leave, retire or step in front of a bus. They own the knowledge that ensures a company is efficient, profitable and successful. They are particularly important in knowledge-based organizations such as software and technology corporations, NGOs, banking and finance, education, government etc. (In our next post we’ll discuss blogging as a way of capturing the tacit knowledge that is more important in manufacturing, mining, retail etc.)
Business Benefits of SME Blogs
The benefits of facilitating blogging by the most knowledgeable people in your company are clear:
- Their knowledge becomes a matter of corporate record. It can be found by others, remains after they leave, and improve the broad corporate knowledge base. This is knowledge management that actually works.
- Rather than sharing their knowledge with one employee at a time (by email, telephone or in person), they can share it with everyone who finds their blog post online.
- In large organizations, blogging by subject matter experts allows geographically distant employees to quickly locate internal sources of expertise. This can reduce outsourcing to external consultant and allow the company as a whole to make more informed decisions.
Authors
Ideally, SME’s recruited for blogging represent the breadth of functions within an organization. Formal titles are of limited use in identifying subject matter experts. Colleagues are frequently better positioned to identify subject matter experts than managers and executives. Particularly in large organizations, the org chart is a poor indicator of who holds the “getting it done” knowledge – although it does a fine job of illustrating who dictates what should be done. There are formal approaches for identifying these individuals (see social analysis below) – or you can simply ask a half dozen people who they would call with a problem.
Target Readership
Any employee trying to solve a problem or understand a process. These knowledge-based blogs are particularly useful for new employees trying to understand how the company actually operates.
Associated Risks
There are three types of risk associated with introducing this form of blogging:
- Distraction
When successful, subject matter blogging approaches have the most knowledgeable employees dedicating part of each day to writing a blog. This means less time to do their current job. (Although – if they are spending much of every day answering questions of employees one on one there might actually be a net productivity increase). - Poor SME Selection
If you pick the wrong people as subject matter experts – and the blogs they write don’t ring true to other employees – the credibility of the project is undermined. Quickly. - Abandonment
Unless blogging is made a formal part of the job description of recruited employees, regular writing will be sacrificed the first time an urgent project comes along. This can negate the entire project if there is not a plan in place to help these SME’s balance their priorities.
Additional Thoughts on Finding Subject Matter Experts
Social network analysis is a brilliantly effective mechanism for quickly locating the most influential subject matter experts in an organization. In its simplest form, social network analysis entails having employees complete a one question survey that asks “Who do you turn to when you have questions at work.” Graphing the results will quickly identify those people employees turn to for answers. More advanced approaches may look at patterns of email messages between employees. (Our upcoming whitepaper discusses the importance of social network analysis in more detail).
Our next post considers facilitated blogging as a means of capturing tacit knowledge.