In my opinion…

Microblogging in the enterprise has been getting a lot of attention lately and speculations are made about its usefulness (or the opposite). To my mind it won’t help manage your information, but it will definitely help it flow and get people out of their e-mail boxes. Informality is another aspect of microblogging which helps quickly materialize knowledge that they would otherwise keep to themselves, yet without locking them into the silos of point-to-point instant messenging as microblogs are logged and shared.

Finally, one of the most important factors for adoption is the “what’s in it for me?” question which also gets a straightforward answer: if you know what people are up to, you’ll be more effective at finding the right person at the right time in order to get your own job done right. It also creates more opportunities for interaction and helps gathering feedback on your own work.

To those who blame these tools for additional information overload and attention diversion, what are you afraid of as long as the tool provides sufficient network/topic/project filtering features and its users stay professional? Receiving 20 status updates is far more useful and less disturbing than being disturbed by 3 people who are looking for information you can’t provide.

At the end of the day, you’ll only know if you try it out for yourself. So if you have the opportunity, I strongly recommend you give these Instant Messenging derivatives a shot. How? Well first choose a tool candidate requiring a minimal setup procedure (this article compares several amongst which my current favorite – Yammer). Find a few motivated folks in your workplace to test drive it but guide them with usage examples to avoid creating just a playground or another “information pit”. Finally, gather their feedback before considering a possible wider deployment.

Remember, even a small communication benefit over zero implementation effort leads to infinite return. So why wouldn’t anyone want to give this a try ? And if you have, what were the hurdles and solutions you encountered ?