I mentioned investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein's commitment to using wikis enterprise-wide in a post last month. Business week has a feature article on that same case study. A few quotes from the article:
Though the likeliest scenario is that e-mail will remain the prime tool for notification and one-to-one communication, "a huge percentage of collaboration will occur outside of e-mail, with a continued rise in these other tools," says Clay Shirky, associate teacher in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University. "There's an enormous untapped value to be gotten by getting collaboration right."
Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. At Ann Arbor (Mich.)-based Soar Technology Inc., an artificial-intelligence company that works on projects for the Office of Naval Research, wikis enable the company to slash in half the time it takes to complete projects. Soar engineer Jacob Crossman says that's because the wikis eliminate the usual flurry of back-and-forth attachments and resulting document-version confusion that's rife in e-mail. At Dresdner, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half.
Show this article to your boss. Start using a free, hosted wiki just to see what its like. And start thinking about some of the ways it can cut cycle time, improve quality, and reduce costs.
Gettin with the family for Thansgiving! back in a few days....
Posted by: kris | 11/23/2005 at 07:43 AM