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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Since I’m in Australia this week, the Friday Flux will be hitting your feed reader a few hours earlier than usual. This week, a post from September 2006 that looks at how a wiki can streamline group collaboration: “Often groups collaborate on a document by “pushing” it out to each member - emailing a file that each person edits on his or her computer, and some attempt is made to coordinate the edits so everyone’s work is equally represented. But what happens when two people think of the same idea and include it in different ways?” Read the post to find out how a wiki can handle this situation elegantly, and make collaborative work easier.

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Larry Cannell recently wrote a piece for Collaboration Loop called I Hate Files, where he argues that reliance on files makes information harder to find & use: “I don’t even want files. What I want is the information stored in a file…I have been thinking about files and documents lately and I have come to the conclusion that our reliance on the computer file as the primary structure for storing our digital “stuff” is hurting us in ways we cannot see. This is holding us back from realizing truly breakthrough capabilities.”

Breakthrough capabilities like those offered by a wiki.

Unlike the file paradigm where individual documents are pushed out to people, a wiki pulls people in to work on information in a common space. That’s a breakthrough capability because it gets past the “physical” limitations of a file, and lets people directly interact with information. This makes for a more sensible organization system, and better version control - both of which are lacking in the file paradigm.

“I believe one of the reasons why it is easier for a group to manage and share documents using online office suites (rather than with files) is because they use the web rather than tolerate it. (emphasis mine) This is an important concept that was noted by Tim O’Reilly in his original Web 2.0 blog post. He referred to it as using the “web as platform” and is an important design pattern for Enterprise 2.0 too.”

One commonality among blogs, wikis and other social tools is that they respond to patterns of human behavior better then tools like email and traditional knowledge management software. Wikipatterns.com was created specifically to document these patterns and give wiki users a place to share information about the trends they see on their own wikis.

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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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In Facing up to Facebook (PDF), the UK Trades Union Congress offers some advice to HR staff regarding employee use of social networks at work: “Employees have a right to a personal life, and provided they do not breach reasonable conduct guidelines, employers should respect this…A responsible way to handle this is for employers to negotiate a reasonable conduct policy with employee representatives, and make it clear to them what is expected of them in their private lives, both offline and online.”

Shiv Singh offers an excellent response that ends with, “Don’t control unless there’s an absolute need to control.” He’s right. If employers venture into the gray territory of telling employees “what is expected of them in their private lives” the approach will backfire and employees will think twice about contributing anything to any tool the employer uses, wiki included.

A later paragraph takes a much more reasoned approach: “The current media hype is sometimes unhelpful and may encourage employers to waste time on imaginary problems, when an honest and open conduct policy, coupled with a hands-off approach to employees’ personal lives could avoid unnecessarily damaging relations with the workforce.” The bottom line with this document is it’s waffling on both sidea of this issue. The bottom line for organizations:

1. Trust your employees
2. Keep tools open
3. Only restrict or control when necessary
4. Don’t make decisions that affect your organization based on hype about things that happen on the open Web.

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This edition: Debunking three lies about social software. This post looks at JP Rangaswami’s take on three lies about social software: 1) it causes groupthink, 2) it is full of inaccuracies, and 3) it destroys privacy. After summarizing his three debunks, I offered some thoughts on how these lies about social software sometimes affect wiki use: “…this is the lie that stops most faculty from using the wiki. They mistakenly think that to use a wiki is to make all of one’s work open to anyone else to edit, but once this point is clarified and they realize they can choose what is editable (i.e. group project, collaborative paper) and what is only readable (i.e. syllabus, course schedule) they become very willing to use the tool.”

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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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That’s the closing line from a recent piece by John Rotenstein which looks at the mindset necessary to use a wiki effectively. John uses the example of the person in the audience of my talk in Sydney back in July who asked how to use the wiki for document management. With a wiki, it’s not about document management - it’s about the contents of that document - the knowledge. Getting that knowledge out of the confines of the document is the best way to get people involved in its collaborative development: “Document management can only point you towards documents, like a traditional search engine. In contrast, when you’ve got information on a wiki you can search for information, link to it, reference it, update it, secure it, blog about it and share it.”

John’s post is an excellent read, especially his thoughts on keeping knowledge in a central location where everyone can access it, as opposed to sequestered on individual computers.

Zoli Erdos also tackels this topic in Flow vs. Structure: Escaping From the Document & Directory Jungle which is also an excellent read.

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Brian Solis writes about some of the resistance to blogging that he encounters from companies, and much of this applies to to wikis and enterprise 2.0 tools in general. For example, one questions he was asked is, “How would you recommend clients use blogging as part of their PR strategy?” The easy answer is I would love them to start…” The same is true with wikis in the enterprise (for a wide range of things, not just PR - keep in mind Brian’s blog is primarily about PR and Marketing). The key is starting - as I wrote earlier: You can’t win if you don’t play.

Another argument has to do with measuring return on investment: “The challenge initially is to justify and measure the investment against a legitimate and proven ROI model. It just doesn’t stack up or compare to anything most companies do today, so it’s an incredibly difficult first step.” Same with wikis. One bright light is this comment by Stan Gibson about wiki use at Motorola: “As at many enterprises that have seen wiki proliferation, Redshaw and Singh performed no cost/benefit analysis ahead of time and have not tracked return on investment. That’s because the investment in wiki technology is so low as to be negligible and the payback is intuitively understood, yet difficult to quantify.”

Brian ends the post with this quote: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and it looks like hard work” – Thomas Edison. This is true, but it goes even further than looking like hard work to start. Blogs, wikis, and social media are difficult to measure using the traditional means, and change the existing power structure in organizations. This scares some people because it means they might lose a certain level of power they’ve enjoyed, but trying to delay adoption of the new tools will only work temporarily, since others who see their value and will directly benefit from them are already bringing them in under the radar.

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