Who'd a Thunk It?

Information Week? You never know from whence the signs of progress come now do you? This is the third time in recent weeks they have done articles that have been really worth looking at - especially given their mainstream proclivities (just because I used the word "proclivities" doesn't mean you have to think about sex). The first was the article that Bob Evans wrote on "the experience economy" about 3 weeks ago. The second was the guest column by GM's Vice-Chairman of Global Development, Bob Lutz on the value of blogging for executives and now an article on the reason that wikis are dramatically altering the content management landscape by Ezra Goodnoe called "How to Use Wikis for Business."

I have to tell you that I'm actually impressed with Information Week's perspective. They've seemingly understood the changes that we're beginning to see and rather than coopt them to an elder's "life was good back then and thus we should not introduce things like electricity" POV, they are trying to work on the IT side of a new business model. Goodnoe, in the article makes the strong point that wikis, unlike content management applications are user controlled, not administrator controlled, create their own ontologies rather than having one enforced and are inherently collaborative (organically I think is the term he uses). He views them as something that work well behind corporate firewalls when it comes to business applications which I agree with in part. Where I differ is that since we are dealing with an extended value chain now (see slide below) the purely "internal" relationship of the corporation is fading fast. It is being replaced by a collaborative value chain that consists of multiple companies who provide a wide variety of services/products. This entire collaborative network, whether it is the brandholding company who is engaged by the customer or the courier service who delivers the products through the brandholder or the company that provides key components to the brandholder to manufacture the products according to a particular schedule or the partner who provides additional services to enrich and enhance the brand so that the value proposition the brandholder provides to the customer is something engaging and full of possibilities for the consummate experience the customer could have with the brand through the value chain's activities. To put it simply (pardon me, Hillary) "It takes a village to please a single customer." Consequently a wiki behind an internal firewall isn't necessarily the best collaboration - a wiki that serves the entire value chain is likely to have more intriguing results, greater productivity and a more global benefit with a wider audience all with a common purpose - to provide a marvelous experience for the brandholder's customer. So hiding it behind the internal firewall could be a detriment, not a benefit. Collaborating with your collaborators is not a particularly novel idea but one that needs to catch the wave a little better than it has. The age of proprietary thinking is over. That isn't to say that privacy and confidentiality isn't a concern or issue. They merit a good deal of concern. But thinking inside the internal corporate box is something that has to be eliminated for a new business logic to take root. The wikis are a great tool for that kind of collaboration and management.

Goodnoe is smart enough to recognize this even if his view is very tactical and even somewhat "old school." But he closes the article in an interesting fashion. "One of the fundamental challenges to all companies is to ensure that information flows through and between groups with as little decay as possible. A wiki is a highly effective means of handling this task. It turns document management into something that can be easily tuned to users' sensibilities rathan the preconceived notions imposed by the developers of content management software."

Smart indeed. Information Week is becoming a surprisingly useful bridge between the new generations of customers, the attempts to at least figure out a new enterprise logic and the reporting by the new generations of tools and by the traditional media. They've got my attention and I'm going to make sure that they continue to. Be on the alert for this publication. They are beginning to get somewhere useful and potentially important.