For a piece in CIO Insight magazine, “Banking on Blogs,” I talked with JP Rangaswami, chief information officer at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein about his use of modern communication tools. One takeaway:
In particular, he’s adopted a variety of conversational tools—weblogs, podcasts, instant messaging, wikis and the like—which he believes are fundamental to fostering better communication and collaboration within the bank. He’s weighed the very real risks against the demonstrated benefits, and concluded that this is the best approach.
What’s striking is how comprehensively Rangaswami has used these tools. While DrKW has an official external blog, the overwhelming majority of the company’s edge-in collaboration is internal. Beginning with some internal blogging experiments in 2003, the operation has expanded to almost 400 internal blogs today, plus a massive wiki presence, sophisticated instant messaging, podcasting and even video-blogging. DrKW’s IT people put the tools in place, explained how to use them, established some policies and then stepped back to see what would happen.
The same issue of the magazine also has a nice interview with tech pioneer Dave Winer and a cover story on Web 2.0 stuff.