Now this is how it is supposed to work!

Dan Bricklin has posted a podcast that he did with Toby Redshaw, corporate VP of Motorola. The podcast is about the use of blogs and wikis within Motorola. Look at these stats:

• They have about 4,433 blogs (about 40,000 blog entries)
• 3,300 wikis (each with often many pages)
• Several thousand FAQs
• 28,000 inquiries and responses in 2,400 forums

Here are some other pieces that I thought were important:

• It was completely viral adoption internally, "without a single memo from upstairs"
• It is heavily used low down in the organization to get things done, and less used and less understood as you go up the organization.
• Three quarters of the company participates by posting to blogs, wikis, forums, and FAQs. He thinks his statistics show that all employees with access to a computer worldwide use the system at least every week.
• They do 2.5 million transactions a day on their system.
• They have 69,000 employees and 75,000 active users (including 8,000 in an extranet with partners, universities, etc.).
• They manage it with four people and some management.
• Any public-facing blogging or wikis (e.g., the CTO has a blog, there is a wiki for the Q) are something separate.

Let's leave the the debate aside for a minute and just agree that these points and these numbers represent an important dynamic and that the dynamic is closely related to learning. Also you could do a quick scan for how much investment they made in doing instructional design for this system. I would argue that the system could benefit from some rationally applied design (maybe after working closely with an anthropologist) but let's be clear - there is a chunk of learning going on here without any help from anyone on the learning and training team whatsoever. That, I think, is worthy of discussion in our profession.

Comments

[Brent Schlenker]

RIGHT ON! It's hard to have the conversation though, when so many are so scared of losing their jobs.
You know I'm 110% with you on this. So, lets see if this year's conference attendees are more open to hearing about it.
See you in Boston! Cheers!