"The Band-Aid solution is an inexpensive, convenient and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems" writes Malcolm Gladwell in his book 'The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference'. "In their history, Band-Aids have probably allowed millions of people to keep working or playing tennis or cooking or walking when they would otherwise have had to stop."This post explores the idea that a Wiki can provide the Band-Aid solution for creative, collaborative business projects. As organisations increasingly rely on geographically dispersed workforces and clients, there is an emerging need to collaborate on projects that span distributed teams and different time zones. Wiki provides a powerful medium for creative collaboration in such situations.

What is a Wiki?

The Wikipedia definition..."A Wiki is computer software that allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites, power community websites, and increasingly being installed by business to provide affordable and effective Intranets or for use in Knowledge Management".

How Can a Wiki help?

With reference to "Wikis for Dummies" by Dan Woods and Peter Thoeny;

• Wikis are flexible which means the organisation of the information on each page can be changed as needed and not just by an expert or an administrator. Anyone can edit pages.

• The Wiki is located in one place to make it easy to share. Pages are stored in a central, shared repository.

• The Wiki is simple, making getting started easy. Wikis are easy to master, which allows other people to join in and create pages. Editing is easy and accessible.

Who uses the Wiki?

To make Wikis successful, you need to understand the conditions under which Wikis thrive and the sorts of people who use them. Wikis are about sharing knowledge; to do so, you have to have enough passion to actually sit down and communicate your ideas. Who does this sort of thing? In the 'The Tipping Point', Malcolm Gladwell describes the concept "The Law of the Few". These people are exceptional, who find out about a trend and through social connections and energy and enthusiasm and personality spread the word. Gladwell describes these people as; Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. Connectors are social glue, they connect people. Mavens are teachers; they share and trade what they know. Salesmen are persuaders; for a successful Wiki to start, some people are actually going to have to be persuaded to do something!

The first things to ask yourself when you set out to introduce a Wiki into an environment are: Who will join me in sharing knowledge on the Wiki? Who has the passion? Do we have enough Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen to make this work?

Conclusion

With the right people, a Wiki is an enabling tool for collaborative business projects. It can be the Band-Aid for quickly establishing a creative, collaborative environment. "The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.

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I've just taken part in a review of some wiki work we have been doing with one of our larger corporate clients. I thought it would be worthwhile to write a post covering just two of the aspects with my high level views (NOTE they are MY views)!

Is the Wiki achieving its purpose?

No, not yet! I believe there are two main reasons for this. One is that not enough people have access to the wiki. For substantial network effects to be realised we need a critical mass of users participating and for this we need greater numbers. After all, a major premise in the now famous book on the subject of Wikinomics, is how mass collaboration changes everything. Once we have numbers of overall users in the thousands (and amongst these therefore a greater number of switched on and evangelical users), I believe we will start to see more useful activity. The other has to do with training. Not training on how to use the wiki (although this is still important since we are talking about a new toolset and the tool is still not being utilised to its full potential - far from) but training on how to work differently - collaboratively, innovatively, virtually, etc. Training is perhaps the incorrect word maybe reprogramming is better! Also, I think we need to focus on the softer side of things like valuing creativity, overcoming fear from participating or making mistakes, negating hierarchy, etc.

What value does the Wiki have?

Currently it is being used to store information - meeting minutes, attachments of presentations, etc. This is fairly useful but only touches the surface of possibilities. What should be done and/or supported is use of the wiki in the area touched on by the next questions, i.e. in peoples functions. The two obvious starting points are in generating and managing documentation and the other is in supporting project management. More emphasis should be placed on how people are currently working and delivering against their remit and how the wiki can be used to support this. Task forces by administrators or super users should be undertaken to observe team efforts and then make suggestions about how the wiki can be used around these efforts.

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It is said that an enterprise wiki makes it easier for business people to collaborate and share knowledge. Wanting to know more I am reading Steward Mader's book "Wiki Patterns". In the book, in the section on "What makes a wiki a wiki?" I discovered why an enterprise wiki is so adaptable, innovative and engaging...

• shifts the social balance away from control and closer to trust
• enables simplified management of multiple wikis for groups, teams and projects
• maintains a revision history for every page that shows the time, date, author, and specific changes made with each revision
• allows people to tag pages with keywords describing their content
• includes permission capability that allows viewing and editing privileges in different spaces in a wiki to be restricted when needed
• allows users to develop their own plug-ins and templates to perform specific tasks
• encourages people to be as transparent as possible about how they work and to keep their work well organised so that others can easily find what they need and use it.

Mader writes "In a general sense, a wiki does perform the functions of content management - creation, editing, organisation, and storage - but it's how the wiki does these things that makes it unique".

I would like to add that an enterprise wiki is about people. In the right hands it's a great tool for enabling relationships and social networking. What do you think?

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A Don Tapscott (author of Wikinomics) slide show presented his not so recent thinking and insights on Wikinomics / Enterprise 2.0. Found on an old post at the Open Innovators site (who by the way are doing an excellent job of cataloging open innovation activities).

This is also a test of Adaptavist's Bubbles Plugin and their widget macro in particular, i.e. to see if I can embed a SlideShare presentation into a Confluence news post...

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