Wikis in the Enterprise

Some links concerning wikis entering the enterprise …

1. Wikis Are Alive and Kicking in the Enterprise (eWeek).

If you haven’t heard that cry already, chances are you will soon, as the use of wikis in enterprise environments spreads like wildfire.Proliferating virally, wiki usage has grown exponentially in recent months, along with other consumer-centric technologies—including blogs, podcasts and RSS—that have made their way into the workplace thanks in part to the influx of the tech-savvy entry-level employees of so-called Generation Y.

Companies like Motorola are experimenting with Wikis across their organization, and they let them develop rather freeflowing. Hence bottom-up implementation efforts dominate this (IT-)engineering dominated realm.

This is good for a start, but we’ll have to progress further and help them conquer the mainstream. This is good practice for enterprises – not only of the technology kind, because there are many advantages:

  • Wikis can help to leverage the knowledge of every single employee and empower emergence through connections with the collective knowledge.
  • Wikis fulfill a genuine need – knowledge workers need and want to collaborate and cooperate across boundaries of time and distance.
  • Wikis can act as easily implementable and usable knowledge repositories, where they support capturing, modeling, sorting and providing of (tacit) and informal knowledge.
  • Wiki knowledge bases can be easily modified, enhanced, adapted, employed and built-upon in flexible ways.

2. Let Freedom Ring (eWeek).

New technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasts and social networks should be welcomed in the enterprise, not ignored.

3. Wikis: New Cultural Model? (Linux Insider)

the wiki model of shared writing and editing is spreading into surprising new realms, from accounting, real estate and academic research to cake design and even intelligence gathering.
[…]
“Wikis are finally becoming mainstream

and

It’s not just a tool; it’s a culture,” […] “The idea that exactly one person has to hold the quill at any moment is an assembly-line concept. The wiki concept is about parallel production. And under the right conditions, the results can be spectacular.”

4. Blogs And Wikis Move In As E-Mail Overload Becomes Unbearable (InformationWeek)

To get things done, knowledge workers are adopting more manageable forms of messaging like blogs and wikis. And as organizations attempt to coordinate dispersed groups around the world, they’re adopting blogs, wikis, and other collaborative communication software to make messaging manageable.

5. and last, I want to recommend Joe Kraus’ four-minute whiteboard demonstration on wikis, of which I’ve learned through Luis Suarez:

However, you would agree with me how there is a good amount of folks out there who still keep coming up to you, or to me, asking us to give them the short version of what a wiki is and see if it would be something that their teams, or their communities, would be able to make effective use of.

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