I previously wrote on the notion of knowledge-focused enterprises (make that:  law firms) using internal, behind-the-firewall blogs as tools for "doing" Knowledge Management.  For example, if your firm has one or two individuals expert in §1031 tax-free exchanges, why shouldn't they collaborate on a blog reflecting their experiences with real transactions and their dissection of the various issues that arise?  After six months or a year, your firm would have a valuable—and proprietary to you—knowledgebase in, to my mind, a near-perfect format:  By default, sorted chronologically so that whenever "timeliness" is deemed important, it's automatically presented in that format; archived by category so that subtopics can be immediately zeroed in on; and open to comment threads so that the author's first draft is not necessarily the last word, and ideas can be refined through interchange.  Even better, no one has to be trained to create and maintain a blog; as a Sun Microsystems analyst observed, "they're like pencils and paper; people know what to do with them."

So what's wrong with this picture?  Sidestepping the question of whether antediluvian attitudes might torpedo such an initiative before it could start, the biggest question to date has been one not susceptible to answering readily:  To wit, is anyone actually doing it?  And what has been their experience?

Now we have at least one case study.  Analyzing the experience of an unidentified European pharmaceutical company with 4,000 employees, operating in 20 countries, it tells the story of that firm's adoption and roll-out of six internal group blogs (150 bloggers total, no individual blogs) based on the Traction Software platform.  Traction was selected because it permits very fine-grained "permissions," as in who can post to, comment upon, edit, and view which blogs.  (For example, although this is a bit unclear, it appears that Traction can make posts to certain category "invisible" to certain users who otherwise have permission to read the entire blog.)

Bottom line:  A rousing success.  "Compared with setting up a similar project on a more traditional CMS or KM platform, the project has been simpler, faster, more effective, and less expensive to implement" (emphasis supplied).

Word to the wise:  The roll-out of this project was exceedingly thoughtful, including limiting it to a small group of self-selected evangelists at first, generating positive word-of-mouth, and providing user-friendly "daily digests" via email (than which nothing is more familiar, for better or worse) to ease people gently into the blog construct.  

Do you hear the same intimations of the exhaustion of top-down, muscle-bound, user-hostile Big IT that I do?