The benefits of a safe blogging environment can be huge for employees who have difficulty expressing themselves in more formal forums. "They can be really great for those not willing to stand up at a meeting," says Dennis D. McDonald, an independent consultant from Alexandria, Virginia. who studies and consults on the use of blogs for project management and internal communications.

Tag It or Bag It

Teaching employees to use blog-editing tools isn't hard, since they essentially look like a lightweight word processor. Instead, the challenge comes in reminding them to tag their posts with keywords that will help with later search and discovery needs.

The tagging might be difficult for a generation of workers accustomed to putting everything into tidy folders on their desktop and corporate shared drives.

Blogs exemplify a different way of looking at information — asking users to accept that information stores will become so vast that taking the time to sort items into folders isn't realistic. Employees (and IT managers) need to learn how to let go. "Instead of organizing it into nice and tidy folders, they'll need to learn to let the data be messy," Charman says. "You just need to make sure they can always find it through search."

A blog post has to have keywords assigned so it will get indexed and then found when someone later enters the relevant topic into a search engine. The aggregation of the tagged search terms is known as a taxonomy, and building a good one is critical if your blogs are to have long-term success in the enterprise space.

Tags can be formulated in ways that best suit your organization. "You can have a tag associated with a person, a sales team, a region or a product," says Yankee Group's Edwards. "It's really up to you. But establishing a proper taxonomy is so important for these tools to be effective. It gives you a smarter search engine. Without it, you will fail."

No's Not a Good Answer

Remember, if companies don't adopt blogging technologies for the enterprise, line-of-business heads are just a credit-card purchase away from a hosted offering.

Dr Greenhalgh chuckles when asked about his relationship to the IT department at the department of health. "It's nothing mean spirited," he explains. "I've just never seen eye-to-eye with the senior information people." Greenhalgh wouldn't mind getting IT's blessing, but he doesn't need its blessing or funding. His new information portal, centrally funded by the department of health, runs via a hosted offering. He just needs user names and passwords for the test groups and he's on his way.