Wednesday, 25 July 2007

Mainstreaming E2.0 Step 1

"The innovation may not be compatible with existing workflows and practices."

Enterprise 2.0 Example:

Traditionally within an organisation the process for writing documentation requires an initial draft to be written up by someone. Once this is done the document enters a recursive phase of editing and approval by the authors of the document, before finally being signed off and distributed as required.

Wiki's challenge this model. In a wiki, a document grows as people add content, and at the same time it is polished as people change wording and correct inaccuracies. A document is only finished when people stop editing and polishing, at which point the authors have reached a consensus. Even then a document is not really finished, there is nothing stopping people adding things and continuing polishing.

This is an uncomfortable situation for most users, as the traditional workflow of creating a document is completely abandoned, and may seem chaotic, with no one person explicitly in control. More alarmingly, for people creating documents in a wiki is the fact that a document is never officially finished, and therefore the workflow is not only different, but the destination is never officially reached.

Solution?

Therefore I think that Enterprise wiki systems should have the functionality to export a document to a file when the group have reached a decision that the document is finished.

This will not please wiki purists, but in the web2.0 space, documents are not the important thing, information is, and furthermore there is no accountability for this information. This is not the case in the Enterprise.

In the Enterprise the goal of writing a document is to finish and file it. By allowing wiki pages to be published as documents, this means that whilst the mechanics of the document workflow process are altered the start and end points are still the same - you set out to create a document - and eventually that is what you achieve.

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