Blogs at Dresdner Kleinwort: Internal, External, or Both

Table of ContentsIntroduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………2Steps Already Taken to Improve Collaboration………………………………………………………….2Overcoming Early Barriers to Collaboration……………………………………………………………..3The Role of Different Key-Players……………………………………………………………………….3The Question of External Blogging………………………………………………………………………4Blogs Put in Simple Terms………………………………………………………………………………...5Blogging: Advantages and Disadvantages…………………………………………………………………6Blogs vs. Wikis…………………………………………………………………………………………….7Internal vs. External Blogs…………………………………………………………………………………8Corporate Blogging………………………………………………………………………………………...8Blogging at Dresdner Kleinwort…………………………………………………………………...……..10Recommendations for Dresdner Kleinwort…………………………………………………………….11Summary………………………………………………………………………………………………….12References………………………………………………………………………………………………...13 IntroductionFormerly known as Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), Dresdner Kleinwort was the investment banking arm of one of the largest banks in Germany known as Dresdner Bank AG. After a few acquisitions and mergers Dresdner Kleinwort became the newest member of the Allianz Group, a German insurance company. Once the merger had taken place the bank was restructured with a new business model and CEO, which helped significantly in terms of profitability. Today Dresdner Kleinwort is headquartered in Frankfurt and London with a rather large network of financial services and offices in Tokyo, New York, Paris, Luxemburg, Singapore, and Hong Kong, giving them international reach while still being based in Europe.

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This international reach stretches 50 offices wide in 35 countries and five continents.[1]Steps Already Taken to Improve CollaborationDresdner Kleinwort offers a number of services and has over 6,000 employees. Due to this combination of such a large employee base along with their widespread geographic sites, it is especially important for Dresdner Kleinwort to take advantage of some kind of system which would allow co-workers to collaborate easily. For this reason the IT department of Dresdner Kleinwort chose to implement a blogging technology solution. The blogging technology was created to be an open source blogging platform called B2Evolution hosted on Dresdner's intranet. It was determined that such a blogging platform would be a great way to record ideas, thoughts, and conversations amongst the organization, in turn making the organization more collaborative.

Overcoming Early Barriers to CollaborationThe initial hurdle for Dresdner with this "new" technology was to figure out how to...