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]

Whenever Apple unveils a new product, Steve Jobs often mentions “Apple Design” alongside all the other new features. And for good reason – the company takes design very seriously – so seriously that it’s a major selling point and the company has won numerous design awards including eight just this month alone.

Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple and author of Rands in Repose and the best-selling Managing Humans, shared some insights into Apple’s approach to design as a panelist at this year’s SXSW conference.

Pixel Perfect Mockups

From Businessweek’s Helen Walters:

This, Lopp admitted, causes a huge amount of work and takes an enormous amount of time. But, he added, “it removes all ambiguity.” That might add time up front, but it removes the need to correct mistakes later on.

10 to 3 to 1

Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good”, which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere.

Designers have complete creative freedom with those initial 10 designs, then choose to three to refine further until they reach the ultimate design.

Paired Design Meetings

Designers have two regular meetings a week. In the first, they explore any idea without constraints – it’s a chance to push their creativity as far as they can – and then some.

In the second, they try to work out all the details for a crazy idea and see how viable it is in reality.

This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.

Too often, organizations constrain themselves by what they think they can get done, and don’t explore seemingly harebrained ideas. Apple does, and in an ingenious way that transforms what could be boundaries into opportunities that result in the unequaled products they seem to produce with amazing consistency.

The paired meetings, Lopp said, give designers a variety of ideas to present to senior management. Designers:

…take the best ideas from the paired design meetings and present those to leadership, who might just decide that some of those ideas are, in fact, their longed-for ponies. In this way, the ponies morph into deliverables. And the C-suite, who are quite reasonable in wanting to know what designers are up to, and absolutely entitled to want to have a say in what’s going on, are involved and included. And that helps to ensure that there are no nasty mistakes down the line.

It’s amazing to see an organization that’s truly postmodern in its ability to transcend ageless stereotypes. Apple’s designers and management seem to recognize that, above all else, both have value in designing, producing, and selling a smash-hit product – not just once, but with consistency. Isn’t that the secret to success?

(via Infinite Loop)

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]