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Extacit Wiki

Introduction

Web 2.0 has changed revolutionised how we interact with the internet. It is now a platform on which a new generation of tools are facilitating collaboration and sharing between users. As the popularity of these tools has grown, businesses have started to investigate how this social computing phenomenon can be used behind the firewall.

The workforce of the future, “Generation Y” - those children born between 1985 and 1995, have grown up with internet access, social networking, tagging and social bookmarking, You-Tube and many other tools with which they interact with daily. Their technical expectations in terms of information management tools in the enterprise will be much higher than “Generation X”. These individuals are powerful knowledge workers, they know how to harness the power of the web. They search, link, communicate, collaborate, rate, share and find what they are looking for with ease.

Enterprise 2.0 is where these individuals will want to work. A place where they can find what they need quickly, locate the experts, collaborate and share what they know. This genre of organisation is what is coming next. Knowledge management systems have failed in the past due to an over-focus on content and structure. In web2.0, the user has the power to create, organise, puvlish and share the knowledge. This user-centric design with simple interfaces is what makes web2.0 as success.

Shared folder drives, outdated Intranets, email overload, and general bad habits when it comes to information management when working on projects makes collaboration difficult. The product suite of the 90’s, e.g. Microsoft Office + Email, facilitated the creation and distribution of knowledge, however it did not provide and sustainable method for tacit knowledge capture, retention or re-use on a large scale.

For collaboration to be successful, we must make knowledge discovery more accessable to all. We must allow users to apply context to informastion through tagging, linking and bookmarking. We must ensure that we can re-use, in order to reduce re-work. There are many collaboration products on the market. Most notably Microsoft Sharepoint and IBM Lotus Quickr. While these products provide some of the collaborative features web2.0’s principles are based on, it is notable that many commentators have criticised these products from the “Big 2”. The wiki model is one which users find more comfortable to use and the standard in-built features of many wiki-based products for enterprise use lend themselves to collaboration and a user-centric experience (one-click page edit, email/rss notification, high-level dashboard visualisation, Office look & feel).

Wiki-Based stakeholder participation on enterprise projects is a concept which allows all project work to be stored in “One” place. Participants are automatically updated with the latest changes to the project “Space”. Documentation can now have a consistent look and feel using templates. All documentation can be searched much easier. Each document can be given context by linking it to others, adding tags or bookmarks, attaching it to a page describing the work that went towards creating the document e.g. workshop minutes, or meeting notes.

mooneycol	Latest page update: made by mooneycol , Oct 24 2007, 7:38 PM EDT (about this update About This Update Edited by mooneycol view changes - complete history)
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