Ross Mayfield, co-founder and CEO of Socialtext, and I had a great chat yesterday about wikis and group productivity. I have to say it was a very informative conversation - Ross was very eloquent and had a lot to teach me about wikis in particular. Although I have an account with Socialtext, I am more than convinced that I have not used it to its fullest extent.
Socialtext is a wiki-based social software aimed at the enterprise market. The idea was to take wikis plus blogs and add tools, and support, to make it easy to use by enterprise customers for collaboration. The use of blogs & wikis for collaboration, will be covered by Ross at the upcoming Collaborative Technologies Conference, now less than two weeks away.
So, what are the benefits to using something like Socialtext, or more generally, wikis and blogs, for collaboration? Well, let's look at the most common method of collaboration today. Email is high on the list. How many emails do you receive each day from people in your project group? How many are to you that don't get shared? How many are group emails you may not wish to get? And do you really spend the time to organize them to find them later? Worse still, do you ever look at them again?
The average Fortune 1000 employee spends 4 hours in email everyday, where email captures 75% of knowledge and 90% of collaboration time. So, email carries with it a lot of inefficiencies in productivity and, by its archiving system and inconsistent sending lists, does not foster group memory. My email archive is different from those in my project team - my memory of the project is just one of many isolated threads of the overall picture - our group memories are disrupted, and there is no way to easily share them with new group members.
Wikis, when used for project communication instead of group emails can help solve these issues. Socialtext has found that time savings and shared understanding through access to information can reduce the project cycle by 25%. Group emails create occupational spam; with a wiki, you can choose which material you are notified of, how often, and in what form (email, RSS). This type of asynchronous communication gives you the control.
Read more on the CTC blog...
1. Benjamin Naftzger on June 8, 2005 07:02 PM writes...
Wiki's are indeed one of the most pragmatic knowledge management tools to arise of late.
Enterprise wikis (enhanced for the corpoate environment) are beginning to take hold in the corporate environment. The 450 organisations that have purchased Atlassian's Confluence - the enterprise wiki - in the past 18 months are testemant to this trend: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/customers.jsp
There are some great testimonials too on Atlassian's website which depict just how successful wikis are within their organisations: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/testimonials.jsp
Once people understand how wikis can deliver true value (I am talking about real down to earth differences), the productivity benefits for organisations around the world will be significant. This might sound hyped up but I can't stress the value of their practical applications enough. Giving _everyone_ in your organisation the ability to collaborate online, store and share content, documents and files, easily search through everything (very Googlesque), coupled with detailed page histories and fine grained permissioning makes for a fantastic knowledge management solution (intranet/extranet/document management/etc).
Great to hear you guys are helping to spread the word :)
Permalink to Comment2. arieanna on June 8, 2005 07:12 PM writes...
Thanks for your commentary. I think wikis have incredible benefits but, to gain traction, we'll just have to keep talking about them and hope that groups start using them and showing their coworkers what they can do.
Permalink to Comment3. Talya on June 9, 2005 04:20 PM writes...
Interesting post. I have had only one experience using wiki, for the colaborative writing of a script, but I´m sure we werent using it at its full capacity. The collaboration stopped for a while, but it will continue soon. I hope this time we can use this platform in a better way. I may not have taken enough time to learn all the concepts, tough, so I found it a little difficult to use at first. That said, I also think it is an excellent tool, but not as intuitive as it should be, at least not for an average user.
Cheers from Mexico.
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