French Caldwell of Gartner offers his take on the Army’s pilot project to gather experience and revise field manuals using a wiki:

The Army saw the failures of doctrine in Iraq, and how the gaps were filled by social networking. To the Army’s great credit, they learned the lesson and then brought the social networking in-house and have supported it.

So — what we may be looking at in the Army is the end of doctrine as training manuals, procedures and instructions — expeditionary warfare requires that those be changed more often than the Cold War system can support — so doctrine exists, but it is stripped of the operational procedures which must change rapidly.

Splitting doctrine and operational procedure makes sense. Instead of spending tremendous resources to write operational procedures based on knowledge from the last conflict, it’s much better to capture it from the field of the current one. That gives the Army staff responsible for maintaining the field manuals a much more up-to-date, relevant set of information to work with.

But what about the core principles, or doctrine. Caldwell asks the question, “Should Your Organization’s Principles Be on a Wiki?” The major focus of the Army’s wiki is operational procedure, but there’s nothing wrong with putting the principles on the wiki as well.

This is where the distinction between view and edit permissions in the wiki is important. Pages containing the operational procedures are open to editing by anyone with appropriate login credentials, but the principles don’t need to be made editable by everyone. Only the people responsible for maintaining the content of the core principles should be given the appropriate permissions to edit them.

For the wiki to be successful, as much information as possible should be available there so it becomes the destination people think of first when looking for information. Setting view and edit permissions on certain information is the tool an organization can use to focus activity where it is needed and appropriate.

(Via VMaryAbraham)