How many times have you seen how different people just don’t seem to get it? How many times have you been confronting yourself with skeptics saying that both wikis and weblogs could not possibly work in a corporate environment? How many times have you seen how folks feel that one of the most powerful collaboration and knowledge sharing tools is e-mail as opposed to others? How many times you wished you had some good reference material, apart from a good reading, that would help you convince those skeptics not just with some fancy words, but also with some hard facts, about how a growing number of different companies are making good use of this new tools suite that is social software to help improve their already existing Knowledge Management systems?
Yes, I know, quite a few times. I have been there myself, and several times. However, I think that from now on I would be able to have some good reference material that I could use to help people get it. Check out Wikis and Blogs Transforming Workflow, written by Shamus McGillicuddy. Over there you would be able to read how wikis and weblogs can be used successfully within any organisation in conjunction with other communication tools like e-mail, in such a way that collaboration and knowledge sharing gets together in wikis and weblogs, amongst other KM tools, in the place they ought to have from all along, and e-mail is just used for what was meant to be.
There are lots of interesting quotes that I could go through but that would make this weblog post far too long, so instead I am just going to quote a couple of my favourite ones and from there onwards I would encourage you to go to Wikis and Blogs Transforming Workflow and read on further:
“E-mail has proven itself to be an indispensable form of communication, but it has limits as a collaborative tool, experts agree. Enterprise content management systems are important for codifying and organizing important corporate data, but they can be expensive and inflexible. Blogs and wikis can fill in the collaborative gap.“
[…]
“Blogs and wikis “capture the working communication” that surrounds content management systems, he said. “It has to do with individuals and product teams, making what people do visible to others in the company,” Lloyd said. […]”
And how about this one:
“Murphy said wikis and blogs are a good way to capture information that might otherwise have no other easily accessible place to be. In IT departments wikis could help track change management. Instead of commenting within software code to explain why changes are made, programmers can explain the changes in a wiki.
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Is there anything else that would need to be added? … Yes, I know, that is what I thought.
Technorati Tags: Knowledge Management, KM, Social Software, Wikis, Weblogs, Enterprise Collaboration
