Thursday, June 02, 2005

Contract Management and Blog

Running a personal Weblog may be the latest craze sweeping the Internet, however, business IT is beginning to warm to the idea of a simple, organized way of online collaboration.

Director of Sydney-based online project management solution TeamFrame.com Maarten Tentij said blogs are no longer just a personal thing.
How can that relate to contract management software??

"We use notes that can be attached to pieces of work that get reviewed by the project manager," Tentij said. "The blog functionality allows the project manager to view all issues reported by all the project's participants on a daily basis - including contract management issues."


Tentij said blogs can be used for any work that requires a group of people to interact. For example, contract management is possible applications of the technology. As such, he is now looking to start a blog for his sales people to facilitate better discussion among them and ultimately improve selling - improve contract management.

"People tend not to categorize e-mail in a useful way, whereas blogs are categorized by a particular topic," he said. Very similar to ordinary contract management software - or content management solution.

Kasell believes blogs and wikis - Web-based content systems that can be edited by anyone - are fuelling team innovation. But like any emerging technology it will be a challenge to integrate blogs into existing business processes. IBM has about 3000 staff bloggers.

Sun Microsystems is also a blog-friendly company with some 1000 employee blogs, seven of which are local.


"Blogs will be used for sources of information that lead to decisions and links to other information," Wong said. "It's really helpful for communicating with co-workers. "