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.

One Comment

  1. 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

Leave a Comment

Books
  • "Highly recommended."
  • "Important and insightful."
  • "Impressive. Read it."
  • Order from Amazon.com
  • Wikipatterns book: a practical guide to improving productivity and collaboration in your organization Using Wiki in Education wiki book

    random image

    Photos
    Click the photo above, or choose a photo essay
    Airbus FactoryBarcelona & MadridBritish Museum
    IstanbulPortoSydneyVancouverYosemite




    Work
    Future Changes is the online home of Stewart Mader, an experienced content strategist and project manager, dynamic speaker to corporate audiences and conferences, and author of two books. He has helped organizations around the world, including Booz Allen Hamilton, Brown University, ICANN, MARS, SAP, and The World Bank develop content strategies and build products that increase information value, collaboration, and employee & customer engagement.

    Future Changes, founded in October 2005, has been cited by CIO Magazine, Fast Company, InformationWeek, InfoWorld, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

    View Work Samples and Work with Stewart