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Enterprise Wikis Seen As a Way to End 'Reply-All' E-Mail Threads

Socialtext's president and co-founder talks about wikis as an enterprise collaboration tool and what wikis mean to companies, their IT departments, and a whole new generation of workers.

By C.G. Lynch

PAGE 2

Traditional enterprise software is the other. If you think about traditional enterprise software, it's top down, highly structured, and is made for rigid business rules. The entire goal is automation of business process to drive down cost. But the net result is someone goes and buys SAP, implements the same 15,000 business processes that it comes with, and all they're doing is paying the ante to stay in the round. They don't gain any competitive advantage. Most employees don't spend their time executing business process. That's a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process. That's what they're doing in their [e-mail] inbox for four hours a day. Email has become the great exception handler.

Unfortunately, what it means is all the learning disappears because it's hidden away in people's inbox. It's not searchable and discoverable or findable through tags and folksonomies. And so just simply moving some of that exception handling into a more transparent, searchable, and discoverable Wiki means that you have the opportunity to gain a different kind of competitive advantage. John Seely Brown and John Hagel wrote this book recently called The Only Sustainable Edge , and there they suggest that the greatest source of sustainable innovation is how you're handling these exceptions to business process.

So at the edge of your organization, there are all kinds of exceptions that are happening. If you handle them appropriately, you can adapt to where the market is going. You can adapt to the problems you have in your existing structures. So I've always looked at it as we're doing the other half of enterprise software: making this unstructured information transparent.

What types of challenges are your customers looking to address with an enterprise wiki like yours?

Mayfield: Over the last four years, we've defined four core areas that pop up in almost every single enterprise deployment that we end up doing. The first of the four solution areas is collaborative intelligence. It's the pattern of the core publishing to the edge, the edge giving feedback, and the edge interacting with the edge. So for example, in marketing and sales operations, you need to communicate to the field organization about an ever changing product line. You need the capability not just to communicate easily with these people, but to be able to get collaborative intelligence to bubble up from them, allowing you to maybe even form a better product design.

 

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