I was introduced to a Wiki through my friend Martin Cleaver. He said wikis will in time alter the social communication practices of how we do business. Now with one of the more innovative projects I have seen in a long time a new book project is emerging called We are Smarter than Me. This book has been inspired by the success of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, largely written and edited by its users.

The central premise of We Are Smarter Than Me is that large groups of people (”We”) can, and should, take responsibility for traditional business functions that are currently performed by companies, industries and experts (”Me”). Examples supporting this concept of we are smarter than me are:

• Procter & Gamble is recruiting 600,000 housewives to help market its products through word of mouth. In return for much greater reach and impact, the company is giving up control of the marketing message, relying on its community of customers/marketers to craft their own message in the most appropriate fashion.
• Microlending websites provide the ability for individuals to lend to small businesses directly. The underwriting decisions (assessing the risk of each loan) are made by individuals, and the price of loan is established through lender bidding. We expect these lending decisions to be superior to the same decisions currently made by experts at banks.
• Patients faced with rare diseases are increasingly turning to internet discussion groups to learn more about risks and treatment options, and as a result are participating with doctors more actively (in some cases much more actively) in decisions regarding their care.

Already more than 1,000 people have signed up to participate; a million more will soon be getting invitations to join. But even without an invitation, you can contribute — by writing, editing, making suggestions or adding graphics.Two of the biggest names in business education — the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — are backing the project.

This project will be closely watched as its roots unfold with the wisdom of the crowd. Some skeptics will project chaos. If all goes this will open up new possibilities for example, an entire company’s employee base being able to help work real-time on a company’s go to market strategy, or altering innovation practices, or simply having conversations to socialize meaning and learn more rapidly. We indeed are privileged with this next generation of social and collaborating toolkits. This project has caught our eye at Helix Commerce International Inc. and our own firm is in discussions about doing a project to test the wiki collaboration book writing waters. So stay tuned, or simply contact martin@helixcommerce.com our Wiki expert at Helix Commerce. We think he eats wikis for breakfast,lunch and dinner and still on such a constant diet of them he does not seem to have any indigestion so he has us all quite enchanted to the point where we use wikis all the time with our clients to do our project work. Still early days but we are experimenting with these toolkits and have chosen Atlassian for our internal infrastructure, after testing the other solutions we liked the more intuitive user interface it had. We also use Twiki for supporting our helixwikiconsulting.com emerging wiki practice. Don’t mind the design it is in early days and will shift in time.

What is clear is the wiki collaboration movement is well underway….and instead of blog being the 2006 word of the year — we think at Helix the KM word for 2007 is likely going to be Wiki, after all my prior colleague and friend Don Tapscott, just released his new book on Wikis and Collaboration a must read for any person interested in learning more about wikis and their transformative capabilities.

Technorati : KM, Knowledge Management, Wikis

The world is changing. “Who knows who” is the new competitive advantage. We have seen the old adage of 6 degrees of separation move to 3 degrees of separation, and with solutions like: LinkedIn, Ryze, Spoke and Vizible are all carving out offerings to increase interaction connections. As Bill Ives in his KM and Portal blog referred to the recent McKinsey research on interactions, knowledge worker productivity opportunities are driven by increasing interaction intelligence. For example, Toyota Motors constantly collaborate with their engineeers and managers to solve business challenges. Knowledge workers are now 80% of an organization’s assets, and learning to understand their interaction practices is critical to business success.

New solutions like wikis offer a competitive advantage as serial wiki innovator, Martin Cleaver communicates on a regular basis. A wiki is best defined as: a writeable intranet which users can make real-time changes to content they have permission to edit.

Companies leading the way achieving interaction advantage using wikis include: UK bank Dresner Kleinwort (DKW), Citibank and Bank of America. According to the former CIO of DKW, JP Rangaswami, ”the wiki counters what you might call the conference room questions problem, where peole have important ideas, information and questions to contribute, but do not want to be seen to do so directly. Small changes soon add up and make a real difference to productivity. When a wiki is set up to serve a certain project, email volume drops by 75 percent.”

Canada I believe is lagging behind so we have launched a new service offering to help close this gap. Check out Helixwikiconsulting.com or contact martin@helixcommerce.com. One of the things I learned when I was with Accenture as a practice partner was that everyone relied on the informal networks of who knew what to get the best and most relevant intelligence to rapidly solve customer needs. Irrespective of the millions of pages logically filed in the Knowledge Exchange, nothing was better than the material on the subject experts current files - not always resident on the internal KM portals.

As businesses transition to ensure experts are sharing their knowledge, there needs to be incentives and tools to enable them to easily contribute and iterate with other colleagues globally. Wikis are a powerful paradigm to help companies work differently. We are starting to use wikis with our Helix clients - we don’t have this right yet. We have learned that training alone and role modeling is insufficient - rather they need daily coaching and institualizaing these tools in their own cultures to unplug old habits.