For the last year I have been evangelising the use of wikis, blogs, social bookmarking etc both within and outside of my current work assignment. For example I’ll often suggest using a wiki when a project team is just about to go off and start a new Word document, place it in the corporate document repository, send round the link and take it in tunrs to edit, followed by a painful review cycle. Following my recommendation I’ll usually distill the benefits and applied usage of wikis in general and for the particular scenario in question. I usually manage to convince people to give it a go, or at least take a look, but this wasn’t always the case.
It took me a while to really appreciate the power of wikis behind the firewall, and it wasn’t until I’d built up a handful of project pages which linked to various parts of each other and external sources, that I really started to see how wikis will transform information sharing and collaboration within a company.
To me the benefits are now obvious and the concept of company knowledge just sitting in a corporate repository with ‘check in’ and ‘check outs’ and layered security seem alien. However, I completely see why probably the vast majority of corporate IT users don’t instantly see why they should default to using a wiki, at least in the early information gathering stages of their work.
So I’ve started to build up a collection of usage scenarios and real life examples within the corporate wiki to pull out of my back pocket during a ‘sales pitch’. Something simple like a project landing page with descriptions of work streams, links to team member bio’s and a list of upcoming and past meetings will do. Then actually edit one of the pages in a ten second live demo, and you should have them hooked.
If you are out there evangelising any aspect of
See also Microsoft Word is Dead by CorporatePunk.
enterprise 2.0