Official Prompt for Week 3:
What uses might a collaborative wiki or blog have in your chosen (current or desired) work environment? How would they support learning and/or performance? What would be the design and implementation challenges if management tried to do this? What would be the design and implementation challenges of a user-initiated effort?
Uses for collaborative wikis and blogs
Wikis are used in lots of places where I work. We use Clearspace softwar for our internal and external social media communities, and blogs are part of that software. In addition to that, engineering uses wikis for some of their development projects.
One of the most popular blog posts I’ve written is about how blogging is a good means of individual reflective practice. Blogging forces the writer to think about the topic they are writing on, and reflect on how they will present the information. Blogging has been a great learning tool for me.
Design and Implementation – User led
The corporate bloggers at EMC first emerged as a user-led group. Several of the bloggers are in very senior positions, so it has been a fantastic way to watch how these leaders do things. Its an opportunity I would not have had if started blogging. So user led in this case was very good, it was a mix of people and everyone was able to impact the genesis of social media in our company.
Design and Implementation – Management led
In some cases, you need to have a management led wiki and/or blog strategy. I’ve seen cases where wikis were set up by people who either didn’t know about a certain process, or because they hated the process. Their new wiki duplicated documents and information, and no one knew which set of information was the latest and the most correct. Going around management in this way pretty much guaranteed that the wiki would get shut down.
Management needs to buy into the project in order to feel comforatable with it. Getting the buy in, and creating clear boundaries that management can feel comforatable with, makes you a partner for management’s goals and visions. This allows management to be your champion, and they love to have the opportunity to look like the good guy.
And after all, isn’t that really our job, to make management look good? 