Why Wiki's Matter

Posted by Phil Kessler on July 10, 2009, 8:40 AM EDT

In the Concourse Connect social networking suite, every individual profile, whether a registered user, a company, a group or a project has a wiki tab that allows users with the proper permissions to add content.  Wiki's are useful in a number of ways, but there are two use cases that stand out. Let's call them the Smooth and the Knowledge.

The Smooth Wiki is used in a business to keep a process moving along.  Suppose your loading dock is tracking shipments into your plant.  All along the route, people are adding infprmation about the shipmemts location, size, distribution, etc.  Anyone reading the wiki has an up to the minute view of the status of that specific order.  Now imagine a company receiving hundreds of shipments a day and the Smooth Wiki becomes a useful tool.

The Knowledge Wiki may be even more important to an organization.  Every person has knowledge about their own area that would be useful to share so that others could benefit from.  Giving access to the Knowledge Wiki to a wide variety of users in various departments - sales, marketing, human resources - and encouraging short entries that are organized around specific topics creates a real time operations manual written by the people using those processes every day.  Imagine a new hire being able to access a deep wiki category, updated regularly, to learn about his new responsibilites from the people he'll be working with, instead of an SOP manual that gets updated once a year.

Since they're not perceived as being mission critical, Knowledge Wiki's have a harder time getting established.  But if management realizes the value and encourages their use, they can become every bit as important as the Smooth Wiki.