Hot of the press in the “Sydney Morning Herald”, Working the Wiki Way.
So what’s the Key usage by Global Product manage of Cochlear in Australia?
Keeping track of changes through a daily summary email of the pages he’s watching !
Interesting .. so it keeps his email traffic down.
Other benefits mentioned in the article:
Wikis are good for project management, for to do’s, status reports, creating an issues log - you’re always up to date. There’s no collating reports from everyone at the end of the week for an update. Wikis have version-control built in, so there is a history of changes.
I must admit, I do like the automatic version control, especially when tools allow you to view what has changed.
The article also mentions that:
“The main benefit of using wikis for Ephox is improved staff productivity, says Andrew Roberts, its US-based chief executive officer. There is “much less internal email traffic, better collaboration and communication between our offices. More of our systems and procedures are documented and easily accessible.”
This point leads into the challenges section. There is a cultural aspect to Wikis. At my work, we have fostered good Wiki practices within our technical staff, but bordering on abysmal failure in the business and help desk staff.
Key Challenges (from the article):
“The free-form structure (lends itself to) different designs, so it requires consistency within the team,” says Mr Kasell. Also, while editable content is enabling, it can be dangerous.”
I can say I have experienced this first hand. Even within pages, sometimes people have just dumped things without any thought about readability or consistency.
I will also add to the negative that it needs a GUI interface that is similiar to word, and can load in the browser. No non-technical user wants to learn CamelCase or some Wikitext. I have mentioned before that I think WikiWords or CamelCase are an ugly hack, and are not really understood or liked by non-programmer folk. I believe that confluence (see below and in article for more details), has a GUI writing tool which would greatly aid the uptake of such a tool within the rest of an organisation.
In regards to consistency, freshness and security:
… as content evolves, it must be kept tidy, he says. “You need a wiki “gardener”, a person who runs a report to find old, abandoned pages and then cleans them up.”
“But we aren’t concerned about sabotage or stupid comments. There is social policing within wikis. People wouldn’t go to Flinders Street Station and shout expletives at the top of their lungs, and they wouldn’t do it on a wiki, either.”
The article also mentions the Australia company Attlassian, who produce an Enterprise Wiki called Confluence (and Jira Bugtracking). I have used Jira from these people and really like the interface. We chose an opensource wiki at work, DokuWiki, which does aid in documenting what might have just occured in an email otherwise. Instead, when people remember or are prompted, they write or edit a page and send out the link.
It seems that Wikis are moving from the technical staff to other areas or even the whole organisation. Even thought they have been around for 7 years or so the technology is maturing and moving towards the masses.
This stuff isn’t new, just more mainstream.
There are more useful spreadsheet wiki like environments taking form and changing the way people are thinking about communicating and collaboration. Being able to embed video (YouTube, Google) and audio within pages, whether a wiki or an online spreadsheets is changing our interactions.
