4. Do you create a public blog for AeroPrecision? Why or why not? Just this month, your company, AeroPrecision, a manufacturer of aircraft engine components, completed the upgrade of its computer system—the fi rst upgrade in nearly 15 years.116 Everyone cheered when the DOSbased operating software was replaced with the newest Windows-based version. Now, for the fi rst time data are being electronically collected directly from the factory fl oor, and the engineering, tooling, and maintenance departments are connected. You and the other top managers expect to reap terrifi c gains in productivity—and profi tability—as a result of the upgrade. As the operations manager, you were ultimately responsible for revamping the entire system, and the process has left you motivated to adopt even more technological advances.

Over the course of the upgrade, you came across several short articles and references to blogs, which you learned was short for “Web logs.” Not too savvy about these things at the time, you turned to asked your IT consultant, and she told you that blogs are web pages that serve as publicly accessible journals. That didn’t help you much, so she directed you to a variety of blogs to fi nd out what they were all about. After only a few visits you started thinking about creating a blog for AeroPrecision.

Some managers use blogs to communicate with employees, and others use them as marketing tools to

“get the message out” about their companies. The question for you is how AeroPrecision would use blogs. Only 30 of AeroPrecision’s 100 employees have computers at their desks (only 30 have desks). The rest of the employees are shop-fl oor workers who use the 20 terminals located on stands throughout the factory to record their personal production information. Shop-fl oor terminals don’t have Internet access. Could you justify connecting the 20 factory terminals to the Internet? And do you really want employees standing around the shop-fl oor terminals reading a company blog? But then you wonder,

“Would that be any different from them hovering around the bulletin board by the time clock reading the company’s biweekly newsletter? And with a blog, the information would be more timely.”