The email is dead! Long live the wiki!

Ever feel like you are suffering from information overload? That your email inbox is creaking under the weight of inappropriate emails asking whoever borrowed the big presentation folder to please return it to the second floor. Or how about that flashing red light of your blackberry? Who would have thought that a small flashy red light would have so much control over us? ‘…Light is flashing must check it now!,… the light is my master….’

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I came across this article on my hometown newspaper website, The Belfast Telegraph a while back now and found it really interesting in terms of just how fast methods of communications are at changing and evolving. The full article can be seen in the link above, but to summarise, it centres around an incident with a top executive at the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort who at receiving 250 emails a day had a fit of Crackberry rage and smashed the handset on his kitchen worktop. When his bosses found out about the incident rather than issue him with a reprimand they actually set about an initiative to find a system that would limit the use of actual emailing within the entire company. Their belief was centred on the premise that too much information harms productivity and that email is controlling us rather than the other way round.

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The alternative that these guys came up with was a type of wiki (Socialtext) which:

‘Much like Wikipedia, Socialtext allows people to set up pages for specific projects, and invite anyone to collaborate: edit text, add comments, hold discussions, and link to other documents, graphics or internet sites. In short, it removed the need to send e-mails – something that everyone at Dresdner Kleinwort agreed had only caused confusion, with all the endless conversational threads and differing versions of documents.’

Use of emailing at the company has dropped significantly.

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We recently won a global client who works using a wiki system and it does faciliate better sharing of information, a clearer understanding of where we are at with our projects and instills a real sense of collaboration between all parties involved.

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The article goes on to touch on the benefits of Google applications like Goggle Docs which enable a community of people to contribute to and edit the same document. The use of wiki’s and applications like Google Docs are more examples of the ‘open source’ culture the digital age is facilitating – people (especially in a global business context) can have dialogue with each in a more productive, collaborative and efficient way like never before.

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The World really is Flatter.

Comments

[John Whitehurst]

Interesting ... I have just started to use wikis for projects - they are much better than email and shared drives.

Getting people to engage with them is the key - people still live in email world. But from a personal perspective i really don't find email effective.

Especially when trying to run a project - there are a number of free and some quite cheap tools (if you want to make it look nice) you can use.

So the barriers to use are quite low.

And an even bigger plus is the great name - it takes me back to being a kid and Jam On Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song) - Newcleus