We’ve just been sub-contracted to help run the project office for a technology development project. The project involves creating a new platform to address supply chain issues in a media company, with challenging timescales and various contractors and stake holders here and Internationally. Of course we are adopting a sensible, browser based collaboration technology as the project repository and as backbone of our team communication. You know I’m a big fan of wiki technology, and this time we are using Central Desktop for the project intranet. This is an interesting product, because the underlying technology is wiki based, but the user interface and terminology avoid the wiki term. The product is oriented towards business teams collaborating on projects, communicating or creating a knowledge base. Products like Jot or SocialText usually start with a blank wiki page allowing you maximum flexibility to create a workspace and let it evolve the way the group needs it to go. This approach can work well, but new users who are less used to this kind of technology can get lost, or even overwhelmed - someone usually needs to impose some structure to get the job started properly. This is another of those cases where less is more. Reducing the number of choices for the user leads to a simpler solution. Central Desktop’s approach is to give you a number of pre-formatted template choices when you create your workspace. If it is going to be a project collaboration workspace, then the system builds a structure with a group calendar, tasks, milestones, discussion threads, notes, file repository. The solution seems to work very well for this type of collaboration requirement, but I’ll report some more as we use it “in anger” over the next six weeks.
But while I was thinking about the topic, the Central Desktop site pointed me to a recent ZDNet article posted by David Berlind - “Reality Check: Wikis? Sorry. Never heard of them.“ After the keynote presentation at Gartner’s recent Symposium/ITxpo in San Francisco, David did an exit interview of a group of attendees that were standing in a circle outside the auditorium. They all turned out to be IT decision makers for the State of California. Go and listen to the 10 minute podcast, which starts a little slowly but has some useful stuff towards the end. In his piece on the interview David comments:
“But the two most interesting were (1) how the technologies being used by kids today are affecting their decision making and (2) their familiarity with wikis (a technology that holds a huge amount of promise to simultaneously flatten enterprise-wide collaboration, knowledge management, and document storage).”
The second point is quite staggering, because this particular group of IT professionals leaving a Gartner show have no understanding of what a wiki is all about. Of course that tends to be the norm here in Europe, but highlights that the same can still be true in the USA. David’s last comment is the most important:
“if you’re one of the few people out there that get it, you could easily generate competitive advantage for your organization by adopting these technologies well ahead of your competitors.”
Powered By Qumana
