The Workplace Blog

News.com has a nice article on how wikis are changing the world. The article also covers the “behind the firewall” space and how wikis are being used as third generation knowledge management tools. Wikipedia founder, James Wales puts it best when he says, “The basic thing I think makes it work is turning from a model of permissions to a model of accountability. It isn’t that you are allowed or not allowed to edit a certain thing; it’s when you do it, that change is recorded, and if it’s bad, people can see that.” This applies to the enterprise as well.

Apparently, Best Buy has a wiki where its 90,000 employees share information. I wonder how many of those 90,000 employees are using the wiki and what exact information they’re sharing. I imagine the actual number of users is much smaller. It would also be interesting to learn how quickly wikis get adopted in an organization and for what purposes. Like many organizations, Avenue A | Razorfish is playing around with wikis. I’ll talk about our implementation in the next few months and how quickly the wikis are adopted…if at all.

According to BusinessWeek, at a recent conference, Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp implored startups to do less to beat their competition. He literally meant spend less money, hire fewer people, work fewer hours, and — most surprising of all — offer fewer features. As the BusinessWeek article also shows, that philosophy has served Jason and his team very well. They use the web to deliver a project management service. Maybe it is time for intranets to become simpler too.

So Autonomy has decided to by search firm competitor Verity. The enterprise search marketplace has been cluttered with more companies than the market can sustain. This is definitely a good step and should hopefully allow Autonomy to introduce a much stronger search product.

These days it is hard to imagine Google as the underdog in any business. However, as far as the enterprise search space is concerned that’s exactly what they are. A day after Autonomy announced the acquisition, Google introduced a corporate switch offer. Google is offering a Google Mini enterprise search system to any company that replaces its existing search solution with a Google Search Appliance by the end of the year. Nice move.

In a company memo to all Microsoft employees, Bill Gates warns of a disruptive “services wave” that is going to challenge Microsoft. He alludes to how companies like Google, Skype and Salesforce.com have begun to shape the industry in ways never seen before.

Can you imagine a world where Microsoft Office is a web application? Or a world in which each time you open Microsoft Word, you see localized advertisements down the right hand side of your screen? It is obvious that Microsoft has missed the web application revolution, the question is what exactly are they going to do about it and what will it mean for the enterprise workplace. At this point, outside of what we know about Office Communicator, it is a mystery.

For a while we’ve suspected that Google was going to do a little more in enterprise solutions market than just sell a search appliance. It looks like those suspicions are coming true. Google is planning to dedicate a small team to the development of Open Office so that it can be more accessible via the web. Will this change the enterprise workplace in anytime soon? I wouldn’t bet on it but it is nice to see that Microsoft may have some competition in the future. It should result in more innovation and user centric tools that make employees more productive and efficient. Is it too much to ask for an “intranet” sidebar?

Back in September, Matías Fernández Dutto discussed internal blogs at Global PR Week. He has some interesting thoughts on the uses of blogs and also discusses how companies generally react when the idea is first introduced to them.

My favorite lines from his research were, “In an economy based on knowledge, productivity results from people’s capacity to make effective conversations. Internal blogging calls for the rediscovery of productive language, the idea of collective co-creations and the development of the organization’s voice.” Unfortunately, sometimes individuals do not embrace the notion of “co-creations” because they fear that success is a zero sum game where either they or their peers but not both can succeed.