* Growing necessity for branch productivity, or enough already?
I work in a truly distributed workplace – one that relies heavily on IT to make sure we all stay connected with one another and productive. I must admit, though, when our CIO starts a new IT project, even I sometimes say, “Enough already!”
I wonder how many more new applications we could possibly use. (Hey, to me, Excel is usually the answer to everything!) And then, after I finish my grumbling, I slowly find value in these new applications. When I become an advocate, our CIO knows he’s found success – and he almost always does!
One of those applications is our wiki. I was perhaps the slowest in our entire organization to embrace this new tool, which gives us a central, Web-based location to store company information, meeting notes, project plans, and more. Basically, for those of you not familiar, wikis enable the creation of Web pages that individual users can access, view, and edit. The wiki tracks who made what changes, as well.
So for a virtual company, this tool is a good way to store information that employees need to see without worrying about version control. How many times have you looked in your shared server for a file, only to find 15 different versions?
In Nemertes’ latest benchmark, Building A Successful Virtual Workplace, we found that 32% of organizations are using wikis, and another 5% are evaluating them.
We also found that their usage within the enterprise is sporadic, rather than systemic – meaning that the larger organizations get, the more likely they will deploy wikis within specific small groups or departments rather than companywide. For example, workgroups can use the wiki to take notes or document project events or tasks. Or a sales department can use the wiki to document customer requests, sales quotes, or other data.
The bottom line: If you haven’t considered a wiki, and you’re running any degree of distributed enterprise, consider it. In our research, we found wiki applications were typically open source or Web-based. Products cited include Twiki, Jot Spot (acquired by Google), and kwiki. Drop me a note and let me know how long it takes you to become an advocate.
