From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
Not long ago, online collaboration meant complexity. The available tools required installation of proprietary server software and dedicated programs on each user’s PC. Licensing costs were high, and it often took a small army of consultants to get things working right.
No more. An Increasingly popular tool called a wiki is making group collaboration cheap and simple; so simple, in fact, that I submit that every organization should be looking at one. Many people know of wikis through the popular wikipedia.org encyclopedia, which is among the top sites on the Internet. Any registered user can edit a wikipedia entry, and hundreds of thousands do. The resource is many times larger than the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica.
The same technology that powers Wikipedia can be applied inside your organization to cut cost and clutter and to jumpstart innovation. Wikis are marvelously simple. They provide a shared workspace in which users can create pages and sub-pages containing text, attachments and even multimedia content. Any unauthorized user can change any page, with all changes logged in a journal for easy auditing and rollback. Users can subscribe to wikis via RSS or e-mail.
The wiki can unleash the creative power in your organization by providing an online brainstorming location. It’s more flexible than a discussion group, and it can be integrated with internal blogs to give users a place to share their ideas with a group.
Wikis also help solve the problem of e-mail overload. E-mail was never intended to be a medium for group collaboration. In fact, it’s a lousy way for groups of more than about four people to communicate. But everyone knows how to use it, and so e-mail is constantly applied to tasks for which it isn’t suited. How many times have you been caught in large e-mail exchanges about topics that didn’t apply to you? Wikis move those conversations to a central point, where users can simply subscribe to the discussions that interest them.
There are literally hundreds of open-source wikis available for you to download in use. A good directory of software is available on – where else? – Wikipedia. For the sake of time and reliability, though, you might consider one of the many commercial providers. They include SocialText, JotSpot, Atlassian, MindTouch and Near-Time. There are also many wiki services on the internet the cost little or nothing. They include Wikia, WetPaint, PBWiki and Wikispaces. You can use these sites to start your own wiki for little or no cost and experiment to your heart’s content.
Wikis are a great invention because they open up the world of online collaboration to businesses that previously couldn’t afford it. They’re also inexpensive enough to be applied to small problems. For example, Dickson Allan’s Business Technology and Consulting Group, based in Troy, Mich., uses JotSpot to track sales leads. Previously, the company gathered spreadsheets from across its national sales force and consolidated them for review prior to each weekly sales meeting, according to Kim Lesinski, VP and Practice Director. Changes would then be made to the spreadsheet after the meeting, bounced back and forth for correction and eventually sent out to the field. The practice was time-consuming and error-prone, Lesinski says.
With the JotSpot wiki, sales forecasts are now updated centrally and are available to authorized users at any time. The tool has been so successful that many other departments are now dreaming up their own uses for the wiki, Lesinsky adds.
It doesn’t take much to realize the power of a tool like this to foster innovation. Cut down on bureaucracy, minimize confusion and let people do what they do best. Wikis rule!
Are you using wikis in you business? Tell us about you experience by commenting on this blog.