Month: October 2006

Why Wikis Are Conquering The Enterprise

This is a clear and useful article on Wikis in corporates, by Michael Hickins.

Large companies find communication difficult – a combination of cultural conservatism, finding an appropriate local, relevant scale, the limitation of the tools (“create a shared folder on Exchange[r]”) and the risk of putting one’s head above the parapet.

This leads to arcane, vital knowledge being condensed into a few people who fly beneath the radar of seniority and becom effectively unmanageable (at worst) or underused (at best).

This phenomenon – known to all staff as they have to turn to the ‘wizard’ in the business to get things done – is not on the Board’s agenda until, of course, the triennial business restructuring kicks off and the process consultants note that there are three key people in the business who are single-handedly keeping the stock/finance/buying/security/whatever systems up and running… At which point, Corporate Security resolves to winkle out their knowledge, to never have single points of failure again etc etc. This may sound cynical, but having lived through this more times that it’s polite to recount I don’t see that there’s a change.

Until wikis, of course.

There have been expert systems in the past, of course: knowledge-banks (big licences, arcane operating requirements, massive discipline overhead for categorisation), ticket and FAQ systems (where the users often lack the knowledge to apply the techical incantations they find there) or – gasp – “written documentation” that’s obsolete (or naive) from the outset.

Wikis, however, are lightweight, fast and free. They are so easy that there’s no technical barrier to usage and only the most basic requirements for authorship or contribution.

If you’re looking to set up a Wiki for your team or collaborators within your corporate then this article will help you write the inevitable ‘business justification’. Corporations love to hear nothing more than that other corporations are doing something 😉

The final radical point is that the use of wikis generally challenges both hierarchies and the notion of what’s “confidential”. Wikis are by their nature contributive and they value expertise, clarity, sharing and relevance.

If only that could become the abiding corporate standard for all communication then Web2.0 would have made a major contribution to Good Things Happening In The World… 😉

Update on 8 November, 2006: I see that Intel have launched a new service – SuiteTwo – that combines a wiki (SocialText), blog software (MovableType) and some RSS stuff into a ‘box’. Interesting to see a ‘chip company skipping over desktop software and appealing straight to the Enterprise via a browser and open source software…

Oracle Enters Web 2.0 Fray

Well well. So the enterprise gets Web2.0, eh?

At a recent event – “Inside the Bubble“, organised by Banner – I shared some bar-stool space Sam Sethi, of TechCrunch UK who opined that the ‘next big thing’ would be enterprise software catching the Web2.0 bug.

I nodded, but I didn’t really agree. Having worked in past lives with the painful development cycles of the Oracles of the world I doubted that they’d get their act together quickly enough or, more pertinently, find “openness” a compelling business case.

Interesting therefore to hear of the appropriation of the language of Web2.0 at least via InternetNews.

So, what’s this doohicky of Oracle’s then?

“First, it’s a complete set of standards-based middleware, which gives you all the capability you need to use a service-oriented architecture,”

said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president with Oracle .

The reporting voices Kurian’s desire to free the enterprise from waiting on the IT department and suchlike and it all sounds lovely. However, I’m always warying of whiz-bang offerings that site within a vendor’s development environment – we’ve been hear before: flash, .net, Websphere etc. That said, though, once an enterprise is committed to Oracle then at least there’s now some hope of flexibility for the employees – oh, and some improvement over the standard Oracle “self service” templates? Could that be true? Be still, my beating heart…

Whether hype or not, however difficult implementation may be, it’s a no-brainer that information within an organisation needs to be free, flexible and relevant. Whether we call that Web2.0, common sense or a dream, it’s as important today as it was when first promised some 20 years ago in the Relational Database of Everything on Your PC days.

[Analysis] First look at Second Life

Just been playing with Second Life and thinking of the current ‘gold rush’ to be ‘in the space’ from companies like Reuters, IBM, Adidas and many others. Wrote a quick introduction for InternetRetailing, and I’m sure that this is a topic I’ll be returning to in the near future. In the meantime I need to find someone that’ll help me get an avatar with visible cheekbones and a chiselled chin…

The good folk at Banner have put up the video from the panel discussion they ran: “Inside the Bubble”.

I am guilty of being In Posession of a Welsh Accent While Balancing on a Bar Stool.

Web 2.0: The ‘Consumerization’ of The Enterprise

Nice, succinct article, citing Gartner’s analysis, of how Web2.0 technologies will permeate the enterprise.

The real point however, behind the obvious “new widgets trickle-down to enterprise” comments, is that these technologies and capabilities will challenge the established working practices and silo-mentality that pervades large companies.

Web2.0 enables and thrives upon collaboration. Traditional organisations are based upon departments, reporting lines and hierarchical processes. The latter will no doubt seek to appropriate the former, but let’s hope that a combination of new tools, a little luck and new staff whose open working practices have been formed outside staid businesses will gradually subvert OldSkool business.

This isn’t to propose a hippy utopia of careless, structure-free dossing at work. Rather, it’s a plea for openness, collaboration and peering within the enterprise. Fingers crossed.