This is from Jordan Frank, Vice President Sales & Business Development at Traction Software. I’m in Providence, RI to deliver the closing keynote this afternoon at Traction User Group 2009.

Awhile back, Stewart Mader was involved in a discussion about the role  of professional services in emergent systems like wikis. In the many pilots I’ve seen its become increasingly clear that adoption doesn’t just happen on its own, there are a variety of factors ranging from technology to timing to training and even taxonomy (or folksonomy, if you will) which all play a role.

The role of professional services, in my words, is to bring forward best practices and to accelerate the process of identifying the emergent patterns that may be specific to any one organization.

In Structuring for Emergence, I’ve discussed how those patterns are a part of organizational grain and are best exposed when in context of a facilitating structure. The facilitating structure is defined by the technology deployed, the organization of the content in that technology (including space names, permissions, tags, and the way information is visually displayed) as well as the behavioral, organizational orientation to the technology (including whether there is training, whether contribution is compulsive or voluntary, and how communication in such a system aligns, or doesn’t, with job role and position).

These two cases explain how services facilitate better outcomes, faster:

• Fixture Manufacturing Company: A customer installed TeamPage and started establishing workspaces with no problem. His first few steps were to make a workspace for each competitor. In just a few moments of discussion, we agreed he would be better off with a Market Research workspace containing a tag for each competitor. He engineered his workspaces accordingly and is thriving as he joins the 12-Month club in November 2009.
• Pharmaceutical Marketing Division: Pharmaceutical firms are required to err on the side of caution when sharing information, but have high value for information sharing and relish the opportunity reduce barriers as much as possible. A customer needed two layers of review and started off with a process that involved information content approval by a product specific marketing manager and review of tag usage by a content administrator. I showed them how timing effects could delay the publishing process by days if not a week or more in such a two tier process.

  Instead, we decided on a parallel process where the product marketing manager approved content for publishing while in a separate and independent process, a content administrator was sure to review the use of tags on the content. The latter step is important for wiki gardening, but not a necessary barrier between contribution of draft content and approval for publishing to the enterprise.

Despite anyone’s judgement as to what % of collaboration success is attributed to Technology vs. People, getting the technology right and configuring it in a way that meets rather than defeats a need is a Door 1 pre-requisite.

In the week since I announced the launch of consultancy services, the response from around the web has been phenomenal. Here’s what people are saying:

Luis Suarez – “Grow Your Wiki” Grows into Specialist Consultancy:

In case you don’t know much about Stewart, which I doubt, since he is a very prolific blogger, incredibly engaging speaker, writer of one of the most essential books on wikis and corporate wiki adoption: Wikipatterns, active twitterer, too (On top of various other social networking sites!), I can honestly say that you are missing out on one of the smartest talents within the Enterprise 2.0 space we have nowadays.

Thomas Vander Wal – Stewart Mader is Now Solo and One to Watch and Hire:

Stewart wrote the best book on understanding wikis and adoption, Wikipatterns and is my personal favorite speaker on the subject of wikis. Others may have more broadly known names, but can not come close to touching his breadth nor depth of knowledge on the subject. His understandings of wikis and their intersection with other forms and types of social tools is unsurpassed. [Read more]

Last week, I got a message from Maria Breza, BusinessWeek’s Marketing Director, inviting me to try Business Exchange.

It’s a new site the magazine’s publishers are hoping will engage – and build – its audience by giving them the ability to read, save (bookmark a story someone else has already added), and add news items from around the web.

The fact that I can save relevant content – even if it’s not from BusinessWeek – is a good move for the long-term success of this site. Richard Pérez-Peña of the New York Times says:

This is hardly a revolutionary idea in the wiki era, but for a mainstream publication, it represents a significant loosening of control. (But not too loose — new topics require editorial approval, promised within 24 hours, and objectionable posts will be taken down.)

BusinessWeek has a number of features planned for the site: [Read more]

Janet Rae Dupree suggests that since computers are already doing left brain tasks so well, it’s time for us to focus more on our imaginative, creative right-brains:

…now that computers can emulate many of the sequential skills of the brain’s left hemisphere — the part that sees the individual trees in a forest — the author Daniel Pink argues that it’s time for our imaginative right brain, which sees the entire forest all at once, to take center stage.

Wikis are good for the right brain, and the creative process, since they don’t bog you down with complex steps and processes – the domain of the left brain. [Read more]

We don’t know whether the president has ever personally used a wiki, but his staff at the White House Office of Management and Budget uses one.

Washington Post columnist Stephen Barr explores how the OMB is using a wiki to track earmarks in the federal budget. Earmarking is a process by which members of Congress designate money for specific projects, often in their home states or congressional districts.

With the wiki, federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks in 10 weeks. In the old days, it would have taken six months to get the information to the OMB.

That’s a great example of the improvement in efficiency that a wiki can bring.

The budget wiki is not as freewheeling as Wikipedia, the sometimes-controversial online encyclopedia. It is the government, after all. For security, federal officials have to ask permission to join; it is not open to the public or Congress.

And a good example of how a wiki fits into the existing landscape of an organization. Security and Permissions are there, and it’s not an open playground for the public. What’s more, it gives people inside OMB a way to work more closely and make better informed decisions that take multiple viewpoints into account:

Karen Evans, who oversees government-wide technology policy at the OMB, views wikis as a way to provide an opportunity “where everybody gets a say” that then leads to “a very informed decision” by officials.

The wiki permits budget officials to work in real time with one another, rather than sort through e-mail chains wending through the government. It allows officials to hold online meetings when time is short or bad weather makes in-person meetings difficult to schedule. It is open around the clock, so federal budget officials may post comments from home at night or on weekends.

This is good for greater communication, handling issues that come up at odd hours faster, and enabling government to work more efficiently.

Then there’s the networking factor. The wiki features a directory of users, with their telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, an important feature in a government where people transfer among agencies or take different jobs every few years.

Jason Fried of 37signals spoke last Friday at SXSW Interactive about the lessons he’s learned from building the successful, Chicago-based software company. All 14 lessons are priceless, but #9 stands out the most for me:

Lesson 9: Follow the Chefs
Jason called chefs the smartest business professionals. He explained this is because they are aware that you become famous and successful by giving knowledge away. For example, chefs have cooking shows and write cook books. Yet it doesn’t stop their restaurants from being successful. In fact, he claimed they are probably more successful because of their sharing.

Day 16 of 21 Days of Wiki Adoption focuses on what to do when people are reluctant to share their knowledge on a wiki, and in that video I suggest that you encourage people to start by sharing a little, and see what they get in return. They’ll get more recognition, heightened interest in their work, and new opportunities that would never have been possible before.

That’s precisely what happens when chefs share their recipes in cookbooks and techniques in their shows. More people go to their restaurants, buy their cookbooks, copy their techniques, and – perhaps most important of all – influence their friends to do the same.

You have the same opportunity with your own knowledge and the power of your organization’s social tools, like a wiki.

A “Science Fair” is a great way for people using wikis to get together – regardless of what they work on – and share how they work:

François Nonnenmacher wrote to tell me about some wiki presentations this week at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany.

Today, Cédric Blum from French mobile phone provider SFR presented on “a collaborative “issues library” has been created that enriches not only in scope the knowledge that customer service agents can depend on but also the way they create and use it.”

Tomorrow, François will present on the wiki he developed for Publicis Consultants.

François has an excellent roundup of notes from today’s presentations on his blog.

Josh Catone writes on Read Write Web that the Obama campaign is using a wiki to organize precinct captains and volunteers for today’s crucial primary-caucus in Texas:

That the Obama campaign is so tech savvy and so open to using social software is unsurprising. They have run one of the most comprehensive online campaigns in recent memory — perhaps ever — generally outperforming opponents on nearly every social network or social media site, and according to a recent post from Ning’s Marc Andreesen, Obama has long been very interested in social networking and how it can affect politics.

The specific appeal of Central Desktop’s wiki-based approach is that allows volunteers to shape the messaging and quickly collaborate with each other without the need to go through a webmaster. The Texas effort, some of which was cloned over from the previous California site, was literally launched a couple of weeks ago in mid-February.

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.