Yeah but ... where's the wiki?

Great points made in this Industryweek article titled "Collaboration In The Supply Chain Speeds Innovation". The author, John Paul Williams, is a global operations executive leading innovations in manufacturing, quality, and engineering and he has implemented Lean Manufacturing & Six Sigma methods. A read through the article and you get the sense that he knows what he's talking about.

My disappointment, however, is that he left out any mention of the one common tool that can be used to facilitate the collaboration, documentation, and process of each and every recommendation he makes - a wiki.

Presumably the means of communicating is the "same ol',  same ol" email, phone, webcast, where someone/everyone is left to their own devices to capture the outcome of all this communicating and rehash it it in multiple, random forums where everyone is left to their own devices to figure out how to access it for future reference.

Mr. Williams advocates excellent tried and true practices. He talks about visual communications (video, pictures, meetings), frequent communications, continuous improvement, Kaizen, etc.

The achilles heel of all that effort, however, is the lack of any means to effectively conduct that communicating and maintain all the derived knowledge in some common context so its collected once and not lost. What is missing is a communications platform that can convey all the information Mr. Williams advocates and allow the participants to continuously discuss, brainstorm, debate, and resolve issues.

Use a wiki.

I do like that list of common attributes 'these innovative teams and organizations have in common' for successfully doing innovation. This list also applies to what wikis can successfully facilitate:

In the U.S., productivity improvements in the overall economy from 1977-2002 were 53%. Manufacturing, typically the leader in new innovations, increased productivity by 109% during the same time period. (U.S. Census Bureau). So what traits do these innovative teams and organizations have in common? Recent studies into creative organizations and projects uncovered the following common denominators:

• Creative discontent with current situation;
• Tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity;
• Cross fertilization of idea from different fields of knowledge;
• Willingness to take risk and strong culture of experimentation, constantly trying and testing small improvements;
• Participation in richly connected social networks;
• Questioning accepted knowledge, testing/search for true cause and effect;
• Reversing a process, willingness to examine problems from many perspectives; and
• Culture of learning.

Comments

[Kevin]

Kris, what an interesting idea. I'm feeling really stupid. My son, who is a senior in engineering at State is doing Six Sigma work this summer. He's decided (for the moment anyway) to make this his career focus. He knows how fanatical I am about the wiki way of working. I need to have a chat with him to see if he's considered the potential role of a wiki in his work. When you're focused on describing things with numbers sometimes the words to describe those numbers take a backseat.

BTW, we're one week away from rolling the specialized enterprise wiki that we've been writing in RoR for the last few months. It's going to rock. The code will be open sourced. Could have lots of CRM implications. I need to give you the dime tour.

[kris]

Kevin - yeah, we all miss the forest for the trees on ocassion. I try to restrain myself with promoting wikis too much with my kids (too much eye-rolling).

Looking forward to that tour.