This is from Matt Wiseley of EditMe. Check out their hosted wiki for group collaboration, knowledge sharing and content management, small business web sites, and more. EditMe also offers affordable professional services to customize your wiki. – Stewart

As with any new technology or process, there will be resistance to change. But unlike many organizational changes involving technology, wikis move away from central control rather than toward it. Employees often view IT as a controlling mechanism within the organization, and the procedures and policies involved in using technology at work are typically enforced with strict physical constraints. With traditional content and knowledge management systems, if you shouldn’t edit something, you probably can’t.

These policies, in concert with the read-only web and media outlets that most people are used to, have given a sort of sacredness to published content. [Read more]

Rob Castaneda, Founder of CustomWare Asia Pacific, wrote Working the “Wiki” Way for the March 2008 issue of Octane, quarterly magazine of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO).

In the article, he discusses how CustomWare uses a wiki internally to improve information flow between teams working on client projects:

The Pain Point

The biggest snag we experienced was transferring knowledge and context from the sales team to the delivery team. This muddled flow of information threatened our client projects.

Rob and his company decided they needed to improve communication, and decided to use a wiki as their collaboration platform. [Read more]

Larry Cannell writes about a recent CIO Magazine interview in which Ross Mayfield discussed 4 common wiki uses that can reduce email. Here are Ross’ four examples, and my suggested Wiki patterns that can help you with each:

1. Collaborative intelligence – “for example, in marketing and sales operations, you need to communicate to the field organization about an ever changing product line.” The pattern I’d use here is Magnet to establish a wiki as the “go-to” place for people out in the field.
2. Participatory knowledge base – “99 percent of the pages created [on the wiki] and tagged allow the call center to go from 20 clicks to find information to four, substantially decreasing search costs and decreasing the average call time by 10 to 20 percent.” I’d use the FAQ and Seed it with content patterns here.
3. Flexible client collaboration – “a collaborative workspace between [a firm] and the client.” Agenda is a good pattern for using the wiki to organize meetings with clients, and kickstart client collaboration.
4. Business social networks – “with your business partners or customers, where you’re communicating to them, getting feedback from them, and they’re interacting directly.” I’d use the Corporate Directory and MySpace patterns as the building blocks of a social network.

The WikiSym 2008 Call for Papers is available now. WikiSym will be held 8-10 September in Porto, Portugal!

WikiFest – 6:00 talks

WikiFest is a new addition this year. It’s devoted to helping you start and grow a successful wiki, and I’ve structured it Pecha Kucha style which means max 6 minutes and 20 slides – get to the point, do it fast, and hear from as many people as possible! [Read more]

John Tropea says people need to understand why they should use Web 2.0 tools in organizations, not just “because everyone else is doing it so I need to as well, and I’ll just use this recipe approach.”

His comments are in reaction to an article in Australian IT – Business yet to harness Web 2.0 – that claims businesses are trying Web 2.0 tools but don’t really understand them or see their value.

The Australian IT article offers little if any substantive information that might help readers better understand why blogs, wikis, social networks, and RSS are so powerful, but Tropea nails it with this one quote: [Read more]