I am currently working on a very large project for
another class that involves analyzing a factory. One component of the project
involves analyzing the information flows through the factory and assessing
whether or not to invest in a computer information system. As I have been turning this over in my mind
for the past couple of days, I started thinking… if blogs are an effective means
of letting professors know what students are thinking and help them to gage
whether or not students understand a particular topic, wouldn’t they also be
effective in the business world as a means of direct communication between
front line workers and top management? Many companies have suggestion boxes in either the physical sense or in
the email sense. But, the downfall to suggestion boxes is the fact that only
one or two people get to read and evaluate them. If employees were to utilize
an internal blog, it accomplishes two things: 1) many people get to see the
suggestions, including co-workers who may add additional value to preliminary
thoughts in development 2) higher end management can gain a better
understanding of what is happening at all levels of the organization. Additionally, blogs could help companies
better institute bottom-up change by giving front-line workers a larger voice
in identifying and remedying common problems they encounter on a daily basis.
These employees have a great deal of knowledge about product development, scrap, customer preferences,
etc.
In doing some research… companies seem to be slowly getting on board with
the idea of using blogs to better connect with their employees from an internal
standpoint, and to better connect with their customers from an external
standpoint. This website talks about using blogs in a business context as a
method of inter-company communication.
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