Collaborate Without Extra Effort, and Track Decision Patterns
Terri Griffith adds two uses to my original article on 8 things you can do with an enterprise wiki. Decision-making becomes more trackable:
Not only can we gather input, but we can make the decision via the wiki as well. The result is that we can always go back and track how we got to the decision we made.
Because the factors impacting a decision are documented, one can see how it was reached and look for patterns that might help a team repeat successful decision-making. In addition, the effort involved in saving, syncing and attaching files associated with everyday collaborative work can be reduced to a minimum, which increases the likelihood that people will participate:
Ideally our transfer of material to the cloud/wiki/team portal occurs passively — as part of just doing the task — rather than as a separate action. For example, if we are communicating via email with attachments of our working document, we have to actively save and sync our work. If we instead just work via the cloud/wiki/team portal the work and conversation are already there — passively with no extra effort.





Dan Keldsen - Information Architected says:
Mar 1st, 2010
Stewart – agree that decision-making and the materials that support decision-making are a great use case for wikis. There’s also a growing trend, led by (beta) tools such as 12sprints (by SAP of all companies) that are specifically built to facilitiate the decision-making process.
As you say “Your Wiki isn’t Wikipedia” – and while I’m a fan of a broad set of flexibile collaborative tools, particularly modern wikis, I like the ability to hone in via some tools that are much more pointed and specific.
I could easily see wiki platforms supporting “smart templates” as part of a decision-making process, as opposed to the more static scaffolds/templates of current day wikis. Some combination of the two strikes me as the ideal.
Cheers,
Dan