Coffee for thought: What’s in a name?

Wikis have been the topic of recent discussions, but here is an interesting thought:

If I were to ask you to describe what you understand by the term “wiki” in under 15 seconds, could you?

If I were to ask you to describe what you understand by the term “Online Pinup board” in under 15 seconds, could you?

More on Wiki Adoption

This text is being republished here from the comments to a previous post.

I am posting it front and center because a couple of people also asked me about wiki adoption today, and I think these might work for them.

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I will admit I used strong language but it was based on some frustration. Let me tell you about our experience with wikis

We use a wiki within our company, but the first people to adopt it
were HR and Marketing — they needed a tool to help them get organized
in specific plans. From their success, Engineering and ITCOMM have
automatically shifted to the tools. I would say our adoption has been
smooth.

The road we took was to first identify areas of inefficiency in our
work, and find tools that explicitly allowed us to gain in those areas
without adding additional overheads and inefficiency. That is a
straightforward approach that most operations consultants would take.

Now the important thing is that this is an implementation of a
continual improvement process — the goal given to everyone is to
improve their ops, and they themselves find a model that works for
them. That is one of the reasons Wikis work for us, because they gave
everyone a bottoms-up approach to modifying the wiki around their
specific workflows.

In the end, they have vested interest in getting together to use the
Wiki. What’s more, all we have had to do is constantly explore new ways
of adjusting work models around wikis with the goal of improving the
functions’ throughput.

So for us, people either “get it”, or “dont get it”, and if not, we
just start doing Thought Experiments and workflow efficiency analysis
with them.

For ITCOMM and Engineering, the shift is usually more
straightforward — often because most good engineers are also well
organized in my observation.

OK, so all that background aside, I will also admit that we still
face some snags on our adoption roadmap — there are people who do not
contribute as often, or do not follow the teams’ conventions or
structure.

So I went to wikipatterns quite like you are hoping — to find answers to our adoption challenges.

To be honest, I spent 2 hours on it and all it did was give me a
migrane. Even back in the hayday when I was designing satellite
base-stations I didn’t see anything so technical as those patterns.

So obvious question is — why should I have to resort to drawing out
a map of fairies and trolls or character profiles on a whiteboard
before I can start getting enough clues to understand how to fix
adoption issues?

If I am trying to find a human solution to a human problem, why start with patterns and character profiles to begin with?

I argue that in most of my consulting career I have not yet seen any
technical people that have an influence in the day-to-day workflows of
other functions. The only thing they can perhaps to do is Internal
Marketing of Wikis (i.e. raise awareness).

However, the adoption decision for each department — in fact, each
person — is based on understanding the benefit to me from using it.

So I argue that you should definitely look to your adoption patterns
with a “sales oriented focus”. Call it post-deployment sales of the
benefits of wikis to internal teams.

I also argue that even technical people will have a hard time
actually adapting the Patterns to their specific situation. Even if
there has been some good work done in identifying “Patterns” of
behaviour, they should only be consumed by academic interests such as
the study of social behaviour in the enterprise. I have my doubts that
these patterns — atleast as they are — can be much useful.

There is no doubt that we need a “best practices for adoption” guide
for wikis, but this is just the wrong approach. As I went there, if
your customers are going to that website as a means of finding
after-sales support, then they might just end up thinking “This company
has no idea what my problems are”.

I am glad to know that you guys are working on a “marketing”
version, but all I am arguing is that we need a “human” version first.

Don’t sell me on wikis, just help me understand them in language
that I relate to… You are, after all, the person that introduced me
(the average consumer) to it.

Om Malik’s WWD suggests that enterprise 2.0 doesn’t work?

Om Malik (Omar?) had been a lead editor of Wired Magazine until starting his own news reporting network GigaOm.com. Starting with a general technology posts, they have branched out to niches which are now more focused.

One of the branches addresses workers on the go, called Web Worker Daily.

They just wrote a piece comparing IM VS Email as a collaboration tool.

What is more interesting is that all of the arguments they present promoting IM as a better collaboration tool go directly against the arguments other companies are making to promote “Enterprise 2.0″ tools such as Blogs and Wikis.

In a work environment, if our ideas are exposed to too many others too early on–as when you know everyone’s watching via “cc” and “reply all,” we’ll be less likely to share the most outrageous ones, the ones that could be just the breakthrough the team needs. In a comparatively sheltered IM exchange, we can test out ideas with less fear of judgment and criticism.

Now, people are promoting blogs with the exact opposite argument, that free-form knowledge sharing can open up knowledge silos with companies.

Psychologists have found that people working in groups suffer consistently from problems like groupthink (coming to a false consensus because of social pressures to be agreeable and to respect dominant members of the group) and social loafing (assuming someone else is doing the work so you can take it easy)–see The Idiocy of Crowds if you want more on that.

How might the wisdom of crowds show up in IM versus email? IM, because it’s mainly one-to-one and brief, doesn’t create an environment that encourages groupthink and social loafing. On IM, you’re mostly left with your own ideas–with a few inputs from your buddy that ideally will be sparks and not dampers to the further fire of ideas. On IM, you can’t assume someone else is doing the work, because you won’t see long dissertations on how this or that should be done.

I really dont think this is an effective argument to make, and this line of thought goes directly against using Wikis within the enterprise to maintain a common evolving knowledge pool.

I personally disagree heavily with this article — Enterprise 2.0 has huge potential to increase transparency and also allow the company to operate on “collective wisdom” rather than subjective individual ideas. Blogs flatten the hierarchy and allow everyone to look at each other’s concerns well before they become issues. Wikis — if used effectlvely — because the yellow notepad of everyone’s thoughts, onyl that you can easily link those thoughts together.

Most of all, every activity can be documented, categorized, and searched up to the satisfaction of any audit department.

We have a full enterprise 2.0 rollout within CDF, and we love it. Most of our status reporting is done throguh blogs, and most of the decision tree within projects are implemented in wikis. 90% of our office is paperless, and it takes seconds to go back to any individual decision even from months ago.

So I would say more Offices should consider moving away from email into blogs and wikis as the official mode of communication within their enterprise.

The single most important benefit that IM cannot provide is link different parts of different conversations, meetings and decisions together into one cohesive thread of thought within the organzation.

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More on Zimbra

I will write about the impact that something like Zimbra could have soon.

It is essentially an embodiment of things I recommend for the Web-20 space. Focus on creating value, rather than creating copies.

For the moment, let me just list some features that makes it better than Outlook and Gmail:

• Shared Calendars built-in
• RSS built-in
• “Save searches” - execute a particular search on-demand on your inbox
• Tagging emails — click on “customers” tag to get all customer conversations
• AJAX-based Document and Spreadsheet (like Writely and Google docs)
• Wiki built in
• Widgets (for wikipedia search ; Yahoo maps ; etc)
• Salesforce Integration built-in
• OTA mobile sync (like Blackberry)
• Much more!

Here are the big questions tho:

1- (Please help me on this) Why is Zimbra still not a compelling purchase? (well atleast it is not for me)

2- Why did Google choose to purchase Writely instead of Zimbra (when both were available)?

I’d look forward to your thoughts on this.

I have a question for all CEOs / Decision Makers

It is a small question, so will only take 10 mins of your time.

Take a look at this product called Zimbra. It is a fantastic email product — possibly the best AJAX-based email + collaboration solution I have seen, and an easy replacement for both MS Outlook and Gmail. By my estimates, it could cut down on my own company’s overheads by atleast 10-15%.

Take a look at their demo.

They seem to have everything going for them — a descriptive website ; great video case studies ; a hosted demo.

Here is the question: After looking at their video demos, and exploring their hosted demos, are you compelled to buy the product?

If not, Why? I really need to know. Please tell me in the comments.

P.S. Zimbra is not paying me to ask this. I merely want to see if other people — like myself — thought the demo was great but still did not feel like buying the product. I am merely trying to understand the thought process.

My own thoughts on this on Thursday