Jason Calacanis was recently asked whether the CIA should blog. His response (in part):
Clearly blogs are a great way for folks to share previously unstructured, but potentially highly relevant, data. There is no real way to just put the random thoughts of thousands of agents into a database, but you can easily do that with a blog, and people can navigate those blogs really easily thanks to the links and tags put in place by humans (as opposed to search, which is so limited when compared to human intelligence).
The problem in most organizations today is that the folks in the trenches--the ones with the best information--don't have a voice. When a company gives everyone the ability to speak on a level playing field you're going to increase the noise level, sure, but that's a small price to pay for the benefit of getting an honest look at what's going on.
Personally, I think the blog and the wiki are wonderul internal communications tools. Sadly, the names themselves have stigmas attached with them. (We have other issues in that all "communication" must be retained, and thus we need to tightly control these things). Still, I think it's time we all start looking at non-conventional communication media more seriously.
E-mail and IM are exclusive means of communicating. That is, unless you've been explicitly included to the conversation, you are not privy to the knowledge represented by the conversation. And even when someone sends out an update / findings summary, you inherently lose context from the original thought pattern.
As Jason suggests, we can build a greater collective knowledge when we imrpove visibility into things that might not otherwise be broadcast. That is precisely why weblogs are so valuable - the information is broadcast and out there for everyone. It is inherently inclusive. This is especially important for folks new to an organization who may not understand how to navigate the project and personal boundaries. (In other words, it helps improve the discoverability problem).
Not to mention situations where there is noThere are situations where the human intellect can glean insight into a problem that may be similar, but not a direct parallel, to something we've tackled in the past. Free form content in a weblog can capture more meta-information that might otherwise be lost - e.g., the context, how and why we reached this decision, other solutions we considered - that might be lost in anything more formal.
Of course, something such as the traditional weblog goes far beyond this collective knowledge. When you capture rich information, you can always scale that back (automatically or otherwise) into higher level views. It serves as a great way to deliver status updates to managers. It serves as a great baseline for distilling formal documentation and best practices. It serves as a great reference a few years down the road on why decisions were made in the past.
We shouldn't underestimate the value in unstructed and informal content in corporate and other bureaucratic scenarios! (Sorry, I got a little fired up there)