Have you ever been in a meeting where you’re working with your customer, you’ve brought additional technical support, and your own people simply were not aligned when it boiled down to your customer’s needs? Perhaps the support folks couldn’t find the location and called you 5 minutes before the meeting for you to realize they were still 10 minutes away. Maybe folks showed up with khakis and a polo when formal attire is required. Or were they flying blind hoping to pick up context during the converstion. No, you’ve never been there before.
Enter the Wiki. The Wiki is an easy to setup and easy to use resource for small departments to large global enterprises that allows information sharing on a real-time basis. What kind of information? Well, any, really. The web-based interface allows point and click reading and editing of information in the wiki. No special formal training is necessary to get started.
Some great ways to leverage a Wiki is to help your folks gain a comfort level about a client before a customer visit. Your wiki may contain local hotel information, good places to eat with your folks reviewing local restaurants, and probably directions including nuances and local landmarks from an airport or hotel. You may choose to enter interesting details of the people your folks might talk to on a client site. For instance, “Joan is responsible for the eCommerce systems and has some strong relationship with marketing, including Manuel and Bruce.” Organizational information will help your folks navigate the communication channels on site. Then simple information about dress code and company culture will help your folks feel comfortable the minute they walk in the door.
Most importantly, the Wiki gives your folks a chance to gain alignment on your clients’ business needs. If sales and delivery update a wiki with relevant information, you now have a platform where all the participants should be up to date about the particular project or initiative. You and your company will gain credibility as you capture your tribal knowledge in a formal way that allows new participants to join the conversation mid-stream in a knowledgeable fashion.
As the Wiki becomes more mainstream you can find its use even in the most protected areas of our government workings. InformationWeek ran a short piece about the CIA leveraging Wiki technology to augment learning and information sharing across their own organization as well as with other government agencies. The CIA’s advice? Organize your wiki by topic and not corporate structure. Start small. And make barriers to use low.
- Andy
3 Responses to The Power of The Wiki
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- LÛCRUM is an information, intelligence and analytics consulting firm comprised of business and technology professionals focused on making data meaningful.
So, Andy, what are some of your favorite wiki tools? I’m experimenting with PB Wiki and WetPaint some.
I use TWiki to manage a global program development team that is made up 4 outsourced development vendors, 2 insourced development teams as well as internal analysts, SMEs and our sponsor of course. These people are from 10 different countries. The best benefit that I receive is to have a common place for documents that are shared by different users located in different parts of the world. So that we can follow the sun – having progress made constantly. One downfall is that if you don’t address the outstanding issues the first part of the day, you loose that overlap work (when it’s AM in NA and early afternoon in Europe). Asia presents a different challange – as we are 12 hours off. For this the answer is to never skip an opportunity to close a pending issue – least it cost you two days!
The challange for me was to organize the site so that people can depend upon areas for certain types of information (funcational, technical, pending issues, etc…)
The site carries the ‘official’ or cannonized truths that the team builds upon.
You can read more about TWiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWiki or http://twiki.org/
I also love the ‘WebChanges’ feature – where it brings up any document that has changed…reverse sorted by date!
And the history (versioning) for documents is also very excellent!
Good luck and have fun!
Forgot to mention that the biggest challange is to get this adopted from a social standpoint…getting people to understand how to use it and for what purpose. I started with a value proposition…this tool will allow us to do the following:
1 – Centralize our information so that we can have one source of truth. No one wants to waste time performing tasks that are not needed or based on incorrect notions.
2 – We can keep our project moving when we are sleeping. By cooperating and committing to answering questions and resolving pending issues as they occur will help our team keep on schedule and allow us to focus better.
3 – When we bring new people on the team, we have less ramp up time because all of our information/progress/secrets are in fact open to learning.
4 – Its not set in stone…use the system, lets change what is klunky! Lets celebrate what works well.
5 – Lets hold each other accountable – since everything is out in the open, we are all committed at the team level. No hidden agendas, no surprises, its all out there!
~Scott Felten