Companies may be having just as difficult a time figuring out what to do with blogs when people leave the company as they do in deciding when and how to start and support a blog initially.
It’s one thing for firms to decide who can and can’t post at the company blog, and to change that lineup at a whim. But once content has been contributed by an author, should it stay up there when the author departs for another job?
The issue proves just as relevant to websites where an author’s work forms the reason for pages to be created and posted in the first place. Sun Microsystem’s chief open source officer Simon Phipps blogged about what he has seen from his former employer, IBM, when it comes to people blowing out of Big Blue.
Phipps left IBM for Sun in 2000, and although he had been mentioned in several places on IBM’s site, those references are being removed. He also noted the “father of Websphere,” Don Ferguson, has been subject to similar editing, evidently for the sin of joining Microsoft.
Websphere has been a fixture in IBM’s Internet strategy for several years. It is an important part of their corporate efforts to gain and keep customers not just for Websphere but for other products like the DB2 database.
Whitewashing Ferguson out of Websphere’s past seems petty at best, malicious at worst. Evidently it will not be a situation that repeats itself at Sun. Phipps wrote of the blogging strategy their CEO and well-known techie blogger Jonathan Schwartz have built to address possible Sun blogger departures:
When we started blogs.sun.com, we had a long discussion about what we should do when employees left. The conclusion we all reached, supported strongly by Jonathan Schwartz who attended the meeting, was that they should simply be left in place, merely closed for further changes. Our view was that, if the blog text had been acceptable when it was published, there was no reason a change of employment status should vary that.
In true corporate tradition, Schwartz even put a positive spin on this policy and employees who leave. “One of Jonathan’s motivations for this was also so that people could pick up where they left off when they rejoined Sun!” said Phipps.
If someone’s information was good enough to post in 2006, it should still be good enough to keep online. Disposing of content or of the acknowledgment of someone’s contribution to a company’s success seems like an idea that should be tossed out with the trash.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
