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.