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]

On Monday, I posted a reader poll asking how you use wikis. As of last night, 127 of you responded, and here’s what you had to say:

There were three respondents who chose “Other”, and here are their specific responses: Managing classroom information, garbage trash, and audits. Now, I can’t really say much about garbage trash, but I can comment on the other two “other” uses:

Managing classroom information is an excellent wiki use. In fact, I got started using wikis doing something very similar – building a wiki-based science curriculum.

Using a wiki for audits is a great use too – besides having all your information easily accessible in one place, the revision history the wiki maintains for every page is very audit-friendly since it shows a complete trail of who contributed information, when they did so, and what was added, changed and removed.

Jeffrey Keefer (Twitter) commented on the post and asked about a poll for education uses. That’s coming next week! He also asked for more information on some of the uses I included in the poll, like project management. Watch for that next week too.

Sixth in a series by guest author Vincenzo Cammarata.

A common element between Wiki philosophy and innovation successful case histories, is the partial or total absence of structure or, saying better, of hierarchy. The possibility, in fact, to contribute in the same way, indifferently at which level you are involved in the organization, is one of the first steps towards the reduction of barriers to collaboration, participation and involvement in the organizational life.

Peering is to intend in the two ways of organizational commitment: from both the perspective, the access to common information and the possibility to contribute to corporate knowledge.

Related WIOWA Questions:

6.a Supporting people (support to effectiveness)

Is everybody able to update useful information like telephone numbers or scheduled meetings?

6.b Resource Allocation (organizational services)

Is everybody able to book meeting room or, in general, common resources?

6.c Flexibility on process design (knowledge/collaborative support)

Is everybody able to recombine documents and then publish it?

6.d Communication (communication and socialization)

Is everybody free to publish (in the intranet or wiki) information useful for your colleagues?

Fifth in a series by guest author Vincenzo Cammarata.

The social networking aspect is the starting point of a company sensible to Enterprise 2.0 – then Wiki – solutions. Introducing this concept in a workplace context is possible to change in a radical and effective way the previous organizational culture.

The first step to stimulate social networking is to allow the creation of personal spaces – if possible with an internal blog – and then to produce a staff list in order to let people know who their colleagues are and which are personal skills that they own. In this way there will be a simpler identification of experts.

Related WIOWA Questions:

5.a Flexibility on process design (support to effectiveness)

Is it easy to identify an expert in the whole community?

5.b Teaming (organizational services)

Are members of teams able to know all the competences and expertises of co-workers?

5.c Decision Making (knowledge and collaborative support)

When the group has to take a decision, it is usual to ask opinion to experts inside the whole community?

5.d Openness to Ideas (communication and socialization)

Are individuals insights visible to the whole community?

You’ll just have to watch the video to find out! Sam and Dennis Howlett discussed the differences between online communities and internal collaboration, and it’s well worth watching:

Stewart asked me to present to ikiw.org community the insights contained in my master’s thesis (MSc in Corporate Communication) titled “Wikibility of Innovation Oriented Workplaces – The CERN Case”.

| View | Upload your own

In this dissertation I focus my attention on the Organizational Cultural aspect of the wiki introduction inside organization, supposing that the main reason – and scope – of this change of Culture (=way in which things are done) is to increase Innovation.

Doing that, as you can see from the presentation here embedded, I pointed out eight Cultural Key Drivers that try to answer to my research questions:

• Which are the attitudes that make an innovation oriented organization a “wikible” workplace or – in other words – a workplace where Wiki really works in an effective way?
• Is possible to audit these attitudes in order to furnish a tool to support management in the roll out phase of the wiki adoption in an Organization?

Starting with tomorrow - for eight days – I’ll describe each of the cultural key drivers, and furnish the relative questions of the Wikibility of Innovation Workplaces Audit (WIOWA) that I propose into my work.

Enjoy to test it in your organization and let me know your opinions.

Vincenzo Cammarata

Doug Cornelius interviews Lee Rosen, president of North Carolina-based Rosen Law Firm, about the firm’s wiki use:

Over the last year, his firm has created three to four thousand pages in the wiki. Lee estimates that 60% of his employees make at least one change to the wiki each day.

Dennis McDonald explores this question in two posts. The first focuses on the external: customer communities, marketing and communication.

The second looks at how social media can be used on the inside – to communicate more frequently, quell potential misunderstandings, and minimize fear and uncertainty.

…thinking of social media strictly as harmony-inducing “tools” run out of corporate HR to help calm employee fears would severely underestimate the role that social media might play.

Who should see it? Who shouldn’t? Who should be able to edit it? Who shouldn’t? These are legitimate questions people ask when first thinking about how to use a wiki. Here’s the answer you should use the first time-and every time-you add information to your wiki:

16 months after acquiring JotSpot, Google relaunched it tonight as Google Sites:

Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it’s just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish Sites to the world.

People can work together on a Site to add…new free-form content.

What they’ve left out of the description is just as telling as what they included, and what they left out is any reference to the word wiki. There’s a pattern on Wikipatterns.com that suggests not using the word wiki when first introducing people to the tool. This helps avoid Wikiphobia, or misunderstanding by people who

• Don’t know what a wiki is and are generally afraid of new tools
• Automatically assume any wiki is like Wikipedia

Google may be taking a similar approach here, and sticking with “Sites” since it’s a more known term at first, and the collaborative nature becomes apparent when people use it.