Less E-Mail, More Wiki, Says Business Week

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The very cool wiki company SocialText was just highlighted in a Business Week article on the decline of email and the ascendancy of wikis for internal organizational communication.

What is a wiki? My short explanation is that a wiki is a web site that any authorized visitor can edit, where all previous versions are saved for easy retrieval, creation of new pages is as simple as giving them a name, and users can receive an automatic notification whenever any page of interest has been changed by anyone. Wikis are great for planning, collaborative document development, knowledge bank creation, etc. They hold great potential for knowledge management.

(Aside: one of my favorite pitches that never got made was to create a wiki for the local University Ethnic Studies department, so that succeeding generations of students and staff could have a depository of cross cultural information that maximized knowledge retention and collaboration. Doesn’t that sound like a cool idea? I wish I could find the time to talk to someone about it.)

Here’s a few highlights from SocialText’s coverage of Business Week’s article Email is So 5 Minutes Ago: It’s being replaced by software that promotes real-time collaboration

  • Legitimate e-mail will drop to 8% this year, down from 12% last year, according to Redwood City (Calif.) e-mail filtering outfit Postini Inc.
  • Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.
  • At Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, 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

  • So far, companies have invested 95% of their spending in business processes, according to Social Life of Information author and former Xerox Corp. (XRX ) Palo Alto Research Center director John Seely Brown. A scant 5% has gone toward supporting ways to mine a corporation’s human capital. That’s why fans say the beyond-e-mail workplace will become a key competitive advantage. In the global race for innovation, it’s not as much about leveraging what’s inside your factories’ machines as what’s in your employees’ heads.

Wikis are not always easy to start using, however. Especially non-technical users have some real psychological barriers to overcome before they buy in substantially to this radically different model for communication and collaboration. It is amazing how much email has staked a claim on our minds and habits! But the benefits really are incredible, and with a good wiki mentor helping new users take advantage of the tool – a wiki really can work very well.

That said, many of the same claims could be regarding other Web 2.0 technologies as well. The above article is good for showing mainstream validation of the tool, but only scrapes the surface of the real benefits of wikis in particular.

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