Wikis – An open book.

I love this post by Mary Abraham on how wikis mess with your mind.  It’s absolutely true within an organisational culture.  I’ve experienced it and I too started off with apprehension that was quickly changed to addiction.  At my previous employer wikis took off albeit a little slowly, but nonetheless ahead of most of our competitors.  The success was simply down to sponsorship from the top down.  The benefits were immediate, the knowledge and the talent in the organisation was blown open and collaboration across teams grew organically or so it seemed.

Virtual teams were created in the content and grew over time.  The fact that people contributed through their own interests was culture changing.  We took it a stage further by integrating presence into the wiki with the goal of creating a tacit knowledge base; meaning that you had the ability to communicate in real-time with contributors to extend the collaboration.

I’m now working on creating a similar platform (or repeating the success) with presence everywhere, but the technology part is easy, the challenge now is to introduce the culture of an open book into the organisation where everyone can publish, search, consume and converse.  That sounds very similar to my old boss JP’s vision of Four Pillars.

Well of course, that’s the culture I supported.