Stewart Mader blogs atWikiConsulting.com

Just flew from Sydney to New York. Spending 20 hours at 35,000 feet gave me a chance to reflect on how rapidly the world is changing. It’s nothing short of amazing that I can get on a plane in Sydney and be pretty well guaranteed to be halfway around the world at a defined time that lets me keep up with whatever I’m doing next.

Its equally amzing that with a wiki, I can work with my mates in Australia, colleagues in Europe, and collaborators in the US - all without trading tons of emails and spending hours in meetings. Instead, I email only when necessary (say, to let someone know the address of a wiki space or page I’ve set up for a project).

When we do have a meeting, it’s short and focused on discussing something that truly needs to be discussed in person, rather than a long series of updates that people can just as well get by watching the wiki pages where we’re collaborating.

And that makes my work amazing. As amazing as that ability to reliably fly halfway around the world. Whoever thought a technology tool would be that amazing?

I do, and I hope you do too. If you’re already using a wiki, excellent! If not, give it a try, and I think you’ll see how immediately useful it is, and how quickly it transforms how you think about - and do - work.

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James Governor recently said of RIM and its ubiquitous BlackBerry: “And who has done more than RIM to change the boundaries of work and play, personal and business communications in this era called 2.0? RIM is the most important company in Office and Enterprise 2.0 in terms of behavioural change, worklife balance and so on. RIM manages you 24 hours a day.” Nick Carr replied with a very insightful comment on the effect of this: “Enterprise 2.0, when seen through the hypnotizing screen of the BlackBerry, does not amount to the liberation of corporate systems by personal systems but rather the colonization of personal systems by corporate systems. Society becomes a social network. My pocket vibrates, therefore I am.”

I’m not sure René Descartes would like this. Why? Because after reading this on a Friday, I was out to dinner the following Saturday night, and directly witnessed the effect of tethering people with BlackBerries. While we were out for dinner, a couple sat down at the table next to us, obviously on a second (or maybe third) date. Throught the next hour, they both proceeded to check their BlackBerries about every 5-10 minutes. On a Saturday night. On a Date. WTF? There were multiple times when one or the other would reach for their BlackBerry while in mid conversation, and just start spining the scroll wheel while the other was still talking.

I shudder to think what might have happened later if the couple decided the date went well and went somewhere “a little quieter” - if you get my drift. In fact, that would be a great Saturday Night Live style spoof TV commercial: imagine a rooftop bar on a starry night, a couple romantically gazing in each other’s eyes…about to kiss…BZZZZZ! “Hang on, I have to check my messages.”

The root of the problem, in my opinion, is that BlackBerries are being used in the wrong way: they are an obvious solution - a band-aid - to deal with the ever-increasing flow of email, but they don’t address the root of the problem and instead quietly encroach on ever more personal time - as evidenced by that couple that couldn’t break away even while on a saturday night date.

If organizations want more productivity from employees, how about making work time more efficient, enabling greater “time on task”, and using a tool that removes a lot of the time-intensive emailing, dealing with attachments, going to meetings, etc. and lets people get right to the real work as quickly as possible? Instead of letting work spill over into personal time, organizations should retool (pun intended!) work time with a wiki so that employees can get real work done, not just appear like they’re working. Then, a BlackBerry could become a notification tool for people to keep up to date on the progress of projects & content on the wiki.

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Andrew McAfee recently wrote a post called How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye that looks at how multiple tools like wikis, blogs, and social networks are useful to workers in complementary ways. He defines a bullseye and set of concentric cirles that represent the typical worker’s ties to others as strong, weak, potential, and none, then shows how each tool is most useful at a particular ring in the bullseye. For example:

“Evidence suggests that wikis let strongly-tied collaborators get their work done better, faster, and with more agility than was previous possible. With a wiki, what’s emergent is the document itself, with ‘document’ defined broadly.”

For weak connections, he explains that the benefit of maintaining a social network is keeping updated on connections and being able to see when the potential for a stronger connection emerges. He gives the exmple of a Facebok status update that let him know a contact was accompanying a foreign head of state to a meeting on technology issues.

“…as a result of his Facebook update, which took him about ten seconds to type and me one second to read, I now know who to reach out to should I ever want to dive into European IT issues, or desire an invitation to the Elysee Palace . SNS lets its users build bridges to new human networks, and to let non-redundant information emerge.”

For the potential connections - the outer ring in the concentric circle - he suggests blogs:

“And what about all the people in the third ring of the circle in the figure— the potentially valuable colleagues who our knowledge worker just hasn’t met yet? Wikis and SNS in their current configurations don’t help her learn of the existence of such people, but an internal corporate blogosphere could.”

If a critical mass of blogging is cultivated in an organization, it creates an information flow for people to tap into by setting up searches for topics of interest, then monitoring RSS feeds of blogs they find useful.

There are multiple ways to use wikis, blogs, and social networks to be better informed, share your knowledge and expertise, and find others who share your interests. Regardless of how you use them - and it’s to your benefit to investigate them and find the uses that suit you - Andrew has offered an excellent rationale for their value.

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Interesting case study on blog, wiki, social media at Wells Fargo: "Wells Fargo claims to have been the first US bank to venture into several Web 2.0 areas including internal and customer facing blogs, MySpace and having a VP of Social Media."

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Back in July I posted a video of my presentation “How do you grow wiki use?” Today, I’m making the slides available as well. It’s taken me a while to post them because my presentations rely on visuals to illustrate the points I make when delivering a presentation in person, and for a long time I’ve felt that visual slides don’t offer much value when posted online by themselves. They don’t have bullet points and lots of text for a reason: a presentation that’s a list of bullet points is nothing more than a handout in my opinion. So it makes it a bit tricky to just post them online.

That’s where SlideShare comes in.

I first discovered SlideShare a few months ago, and posted two other presentations there: The Zen Aesthetic, and Using Blog and Wiki for Your Portfolio. In the months since, I’ve watched SlideShare define a whole new style of presentation. From A new way to define a productive worker to Shift Happens, Meet Henry, and Meet Charlie - What is Enterprise2.0?, SlideShare seems to have pushed presentations to become more visual, emphasize storytelling, and make viewers want to click on to the next slide (or at least provided a place for like-minded authors to share presentations that fit this style). So I think it’s an ideal place to share my presentations, including “How do you grow wiki use?”

The slides are viewable on SlideShare, and both the slides and video are available side-by-side at www.ikiw.org/presentation.

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Anne Gentle: "In the Web 2.0 world, users should and can drive the content. Let’s be part of the solution, giving our customers the tools they need to both consume and contribute meaningful, useful content."

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This is a must read. Jason gets to the point of why Enterprise software is so hard to use - it’s made to appeal to buyers, not users. “The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software. That’s where the disconnect begins. And it pulls and pulls and pulls until the user experience is split from the buying experience so severely that the software vendors are building for the buyers, not the users. The experience takes a back seat to the feature list, future promises, and buzz words.”

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"Now we have a technology that enables self-selection, transparency, openness—how does a manager or management deal with the technology? Do they implement it in a way that’s true to the spirit, or is it top-down?"

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Why do some people spend endless hours pondering the details and splitting hairs over whether using a wiki will provide any value to their organizations? Couldn’t that time be better spent actually using it, and finding out? In Social Media is About Sociology Not Technology, Brian Solis says: Almost daily I hear, “There are so many tools out there that I don’t even know where to jump in” and “I don’t get why any of this matters, maybe I’m just too old.”

I hear the same thing from some of the organizations I visit. They think their environment, problems, etc. are different from anyone else. The reality: they’re all the same, and the reason people inside these organizations think they’re different is a direct result of the inefficiency of their current communication methods. Brian sums it up well: “…how we do things today is long overdue for a complete overhaul and social media is only forcing the evolution that should have happened long before. Whether you jump on board or not, evolution will happen without you. And, not everyone will survive the transition…”

So the question is: Will you get with the program, or not?

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Robert Scoble stopped by Atlassian’s San Francisco office today, and just interviewed me about Wikipatterns.com for his kyte channel: watch the video. Robert interviewed me using a Nokia N95, and it immediately uploads the video to kyte: within seconds after recording the video, we were all gathered around my laptop watching it. Kyte is the kind of tool that I hope will give traditional TV, “news,” etc. a run for its money. Thanks Robert!

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