Lucent Technologies

Michael Angeles of Bell Labs explains how Weblogs are used at Lucent. In his presentation (20 May 2005 | Enterprise Weblogging: Using Weblogs for Communication and Information Management), he discusses a Traction® TeamPage based Training Weblog which was by a Program Management team to keep engineers and users of a new enterprise system up to date. The following narrative is paraphrased from Michael's PowerPoint presentation notes:

The training weblog was launched for training engineers during an enterprise system rollout project which impacted employees across the globe. The blog was used to provide access to documents during training sessions, to field questions during training and to push out all of this information to the engineers.

Needs were as:

• Process for easily archiving output of face to face training
• Method for easily communicating updates in timely and efficient manner
• Place for discussion of changing Engineer’s needs and issues during roll out

One of the goals was to foster understanding:

Traction Interfaces were modified to meet look and feel requirements of the project.

Home Page View (including introduction "Welcome" page, List of Blogs, Recent Articles)

Two primary functions were supported by the Traction weblog:

1. Informing

• Blog supplemented face to face training sessions
• Admins used file attachment feature for training processes and systems document repository

The use of WebDAV in Traction for versioning of uploaded documents gives us most of the functionality we get from current document repository services with better ease of use.

Blog Entry View (including one Post, one Comment, list of Labels for the Blog)

2. Interacting

• Admins used comments and classification tags for answering questions and monitoring status
• Admins pushed daily announcements and answers out via email
• Engineers posted questions, issues and comments via email or web

Question Posting Form:

This is one of the most full-featured blog systems you’ll find. My client is hoping to convince employees of the effectiveness of this tool compared to the current set of systems with the goal of expanding its use so that communities will start recording and sharing information using blogs.

In this phase of our SAP training, administrators measured the success in terms of ease of use for both the administrators and the trainees.

• Administrators were able to push information out more quickly without having to go through the current systems, which tend to take more time to use in terms of entry.
• Most importantly, engineers were getting questions answered via the blog and the answers were stored and publicly accessible to the team.
• Previous Q&A existed as one-off emails that were only integrated with published materials periodically.

This blog was essentially like a paper document that was annotated & passed around. It exposed steps in the processes that led to decision making. It made visible the process of knowledge creation – something that we’ve largely lost with the decreasing use of paper.