Wikis are becoming more common. As most people now know, they are server software that allows users to freely create and edit web pages. Anyone can edit any page and it works best within a trusted environment. The Wikipedia, has developed thousands of volunteers who police the site. Attempts to spam or deface it are often corrected within minutes without most users not even noticing. However, this is not possible or practical for most internet applications. The vulnerability created by the openness of wikis largely disappears behind the firewall where there is more control over access and participation. As a result, there have been many and varied applications of wikis within enterprise intranets.
It seems that once wikis appear behind the firewall their ability to save time quickly gains converts and they proliferate. Here are a few examples I have read about recently in an article, Wikis at Work. At Nokia, wikis were first brought in by the corporate strategy group to make the task of storing and distributing corporate intelligence more efficient. Now there are many applications across the organization. A similar sequence occurred at the Canadian Meteorological Centre. An engineer first brought in a wiki, convinced his boss of its value. Soon a number of additional wikis were operating. The publisher Ziff Davis installed wikis to accelerate project cycles and found they reduces group emails from 100 per day to zero. The Gennova Group, a Boston based association of consultants had similar results as I wrote in Working with Wikis: Part 2.
Last week I was up in Toronto to visit my friends at Helix Commerce. One of their major service offerings is Collaborative Commerce and Cindy Gordon, their CEO recently co-authored a book on the subject, Winning at Collaborative Commerce. As a good example of doing what you encourage and advise others to do, Helix deploys wiki solutions to improve its own collaboration with clients for project management and integrated communication needs. It provides a means for them to model collaborative solutions. Wikis are used to store proposals and contracts, all working matters of client delivery, project meeting notes, project plans, client deliverables, and iterative communications. Helix has found that clients appreciate the integrated environments as it saves them time in accessing email records, and having an audit inventory of all project communication practices in a central and secure repository. This also allows Helix to easily leave the wikis in client hands to continue to evolve and sustain project initiatives used the wiki, as Helix moves onto future client relationships.
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