TORONTO, ON -  I’m cooling my heals and yet another airport stop waiting on yet another rescheduled flight after Air Canada cancelled yet another of my flights because their was a whiff of a thunderstorm. Why can’t they just wait for it to pass? Why do they have to always cancel my flight (the third in the past month)? And don’t I at least qualify for a free bag of peanuts if you won’t let me into the secret VIP flyers ultra lounge? I wonder what they do in there…? I imagine it’s reminiscent of the little singing and dancing chocolate workers at Wonka’s…

Anyways, I’m attempting to get somewhat caught-up on some reading when I came across a good rant from David Berlind at ZDNet.com.

In “RSS: The new intranet protocol”, Berlind suggests that the wiki could be the new intranet and RSS the new protocol. Berlind’s frustration flows from a well-expressed mini rant on the oft used buzzword “collaboration”…

“Collaboration is often too formal.  In other words, you don't collaborate until someone says, "OK, let's collaborate."  In order to say "Let's collaborate" you need to schedule a meeting with a proprietary group calendaring system.  Letting everyone know that you're about to collaborate requires notification which 99 times out of 100 depends on email.  Then once you start collaborating, a record of that collaboration has to be documented using a proprietary documentation technology (eg: word processors, spreadsheets, or presentation applications).

Even worse, there's another proprietary system (a content management system) for storing, searching for, and retrieving those documents; something that happens in the course of collaboration. Something else that happens in the course of collaboration is someone improves those documents at which point, they must be passed around again for another round of collaboration. Passed around on the proprietary email system using oft-forked threads of e-mail that resulted in out-of-synch document changes. To add insult to injury, the e-mail feedback loop which may or may not have involved revisions was completely out of context of the collaborative activities themselves and required tools that were overkill given the requirements.  

At the end of the day, collaborating involves a bunch of walled gardens of technology that all too often, are retrofitted to the art of collaboration and that end up being manually integrated.  In other words, Sue in the Marketing Department finishes tweaking a new campaign proposal and has to remember to send it to Trevor over in Advertising for his thoughts, and so on.”

He’s right; I like the way Brindel thinks. Collaboration is common place; doing it on line however requires a lot of effort and definition, and the appropriate system to support it.

The same is true of course for knowledge management. Knowledge is shared and managed every day in every organization – it’s just not managed very well. And effective knowledge management is more than just a plug-and-play off-the-shelf software such as document management – effective knowledge management depends on highly collaborative and sharing employees who are supported with the right tools and highly defined processes.

But let’s not confuse the intranet with a wiki. The intranet is all-encompassing; the wiki is just a tool or even an emerging platform. Wiki software is not the new intranet platform. An intranet requires too much integration and networking. The wiki may however evolve into one of the most important employee collaboration tools on the intranet, but it’s hard to imagine it replacing a search engine or a content management system.

At the end of the day, collaborating involves a bunch of walled gardens of technology that all too often, are retrofitted to the art of collaboration and that end up being manually integrated.  In other words, Sue in the Marketing Department finishes tweaking a new campaign proposal and has to remember to send it to Trevor over in Advertising for his thoughts, and so on.