By Dan Ortega, Vice President of Marketing, Astoria Software
There have been a number of posts recently regarding the validity and role of wikis as an information delivery vehicle in a corporate setting. Part of the concern is the unregulated nature of how a wiki works. Because a public wiki includes user generated content, there is very little control over what gets posted by whom, when, and how.
If we shift this dynamic into a more structured setting, e.g. user generated content that becomes part of a major corporation’s document repository, we are dealing with an entirely different set of circumstances. The flow of information, regardless of its end destination (marketing, customer support, operations, etc.), is normally under incredibly tight control.
The first loosening of this control was the rise of blogs; however, most corporate employees who blog also have the good sense to realize that what they say is getting blasted out across the web (specifically, across their boss’ desk), so career preservation tends to be a good content regulator. Compare this to personal blogs (particularly the anonymous ones), where anyone with an opinion can yell at the top of their lungs about anything with no consequences. Corporate blogs are a whole different animal and are much more tightly caged.
If you take the notion of a corporate blog and loosen the filters to “evolve” it to a wiki, is this the equivalent of letting a pack of hyenas into your living room? A lot of pundits seem to think so; however, with the proper review and approval mechanisms there is no reason to assume you can’t maintain the same level of control.
The benefits of a wiki as an input mechanism to a documentation process that previously sat behind an information firewall are vast. The people who are most likely to come up with good suggestions to improve a product are going to be: 1) people who are out in the field servicing the products day to day, and 2) people who are using the product and wish it worked better or differently. This is a huge, untapped resource for any manufacturer in nearly any vertical as long as the wiki input is pushed through a review and approval cycle. In fact, once this technology is deployed, your biggest challenge is going to be keeping up with all the good ideas that start streaming in.
About the Author
Dan Ortega is Vice President of Marketing for Astoria Software, where he is responsible for product marketing, product management, and marketing communications. Dan brings over 22 years of technology marketing experience to this position, having previously served as VP of Marketing for a series of successful start-ups, including content management companies such as Metacode Technologies (acquired by Interwoven). Dan has also held senior level international marketing positions with expansion stage companies such as Centigram Communications, and Fortune 500 companies including Sun Microsystems and Wang Labs.
Interested in learning more about what Dan thinks about technical and business communication and rich media? Read his blog.
