Archive for October 21st, 2006

Shortcuts Podcast – How to Use Wikis at Work (Part One)

Posted on Oct 21, 2006 | Categories: Collaboration, Communities, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Tools, Podcasting, Productivity Tools, Social Computing | 8 Comments

In the past you would recall how I have actually been participating in IBM’s Shortcuts podcast in a couple of episodes sharing some thoughts and tips on getting the most out of social bookmarking. Well, I thought you would be interested in another episode, the first out of two, that I have just been working on with the Shortcuts team, but this time around the world of wikis and their adoption within the enterprise sharing some of the many different uses that knowledge workers could benefit from while adopting such wikis within whatever their businesses. We all know how powerful wikis are in general for groups to collaborate so this time around I have shared my thoughts on how some of those groups, specially communities, are making good use of such social software tool.

So if you would want to read or listen further to this week’s Shortcuts then check out Cut #13: How to use wikis at work (part one). In there I get to talk about how wikis are being used as Knowledge Bases, pretty much in the same fashion as online encyclopedias, with Wikipedia as one clear example. Then I talked about how wikis are also being used as project management tools to help augment the value of the already existing PM tools available out there, more than anything else from the perspective of allowing all project members to have a voice and share their thoughts and ideas of how the project is going and help build content on top of each other’s content to enrich the different levels of interactions so that knowledge workers do not get to hear just from a single source but from multiple of them.

Also I get to talk about wikis could well be used as handy communication tools where some of the noise that we all get on a daily basis from both e-mail and Instant Messages could be diverted towards those different wikis so that with the use of RSS feeds we would have the opportunity to control a bit of that noise and just receive and process the messages we would all really need to digest further.

And, finally, one other use for which wikis are being used, and actually one of my favourites, is the fact that plenty of wikis out there have been setup in order to allow knowledge workers capture their best know-how, their handy knowledge snippets, in short, their tacit knowledge, and from there build on top of each others content to then help work it through and perhaps convert it into Intellectual Capital that would then be shared at a later time in other, much more sophisticated, repositories, like Intellectual Capital databases.

So as you can see wikis can certainly be very powerful Knowledge Management and Collaboration tools, so much so that plenty of different groups within the enterprise are actually making use of them as huge boosters of the already existing interactions but bringing a new and fresh method for knowledge sharing where everyone is in control and able to build up content further on top of already existing content. Thus you can imagine that one of the key fundamental aspects for success in the adoption of wikis within the enterprise would be trust, but I guess that would be the subject for another weblog post…

For the time being, if you would want to listen some more what that first part on How to use wikis at work go over to the Shortcuts podcast site and and enjoy the show! (I surely did and I want to thank from here with a massive kudos the Shortcuts team for their kind invitation and for having me in the show, once more. Thanks guys !)

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