Wiki, Blogs in the business setting

I have used wiki and blogs in the studying and working for several years. Since in China, we could not achieve wiki freely, I did not use that. In stead, I used blogs for information and experience sharing. My first utilization of blog into learning is about cosmetic. Here is the link. http://www.wretch.cc/blog/arora The blogger posts her operation on cosmetic products in the blog. As the followers, we learn from her and post our questions on the blog. Not even her, other experienced person will answer our questions. Hence, our learning on cosmetic products will be enhanced.

My experience on wiki is mainly in academic setting. I have used wiki for information collection in a project and used wikispace to set up an online community in some case studies. I will give a specific example here. Last semester, in the organization behavior class, we need to do lots of case studies with some classmates. We used wikispace as our tool to communicate instead of face to face meeting. Every member could publish its own thoughts on wikispace and comment on others. After discussion, we consolidated all the informations and finished our case study. It definitely facilitate the communication and maximize the achievement of collaborative intelligence.

However, there are lots of challenges of the application of wiki and blog in different settings. My concern is in the business setting. There are some successful cases about the application of wiki and blog in business setting. In Lockheed Martin, teh CIO started to use blog when they introduced blog into their work. The electrical engineers use wiki to share the experience and information in Google. However, these successful cases don't mean succeeding in the application of wiki and blogs is a piece of cake. There are lots of challenges.

First, the fear of new tech. Employees will fear of change. The introducing of new tech will mean the redesign of job and significant changes will take place.

Second, the confliction between the existing workflow and the new tech. I have already discussed this in another post.

Third, the motivation of the utilization of new tech.



I recommend again an article here:

Six ways to make web 2.0 work

from McKinsey Quarterly.

In the article, lots of challenges have been analyzed and associated solutions have been provided.

Hope you could enjoy the article.

:)