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govtmag.pngBlogging will free you from the process owners, but you can also quickly be seen as globally stupid, says General James Cartwright in an interview published in The Business of Government. “… if you can’t stand being globally stupid once in a while, this is not the space for you, okay? … This is a big concept,” he says, “a big paradigm shift.”
The US military is embracing internal blogs.

The people who are most threatened by blogging and other collaborative media, are the process owners,” says General Cartwright. They start to see control seeping away from their little kingdoms, he says, because you are allowed to move cross boundaries and correlate information without their approval.


General Cartwright says that internal blogs are proving to be the military tactic of choice and the quickest way to share information because it can handle global activity, all time zones, and inform decision-makers in real time with real information.
The visibility of someone’s profile has a downside. “You can be globally stupid, you know! And you can do it very, very, quickly! And if that bothers you, you’re going to have to toughen up your hide because you are open to criticism.”
Conveying critical information to several key people via blog, he says, is much faster than using a phone conference. “…before you got on the phone, you knew the problem, and the phone call was to make a decision, not to discover… We built it on a very cheap, free platform, and so it cost nothing.
I can’t tell you how many times the GAO (Govt Accountability Office) has asked to come in an audit because they’re sure we’re spending billions…And they think we’re hiding something, it’s somewhere out there on that network, you’ve got a secret headquarters. No, it’s not, and I’m sure in private industry many have found the same thing – this is not major money.”