WikingDivers.com

"People are a company's greatest asset. It doesn't matter if the product is cosmetics or cars. "A company is only as good the people it keeps." Mary Kay Ash

Many CEOs have heard it said that the company's greatest assets are the ones who leave the office at the end each day. This means that a company's greatest assets are its people. They have the collective knowledge, skills, workflows, ideas, networks and relationships, as well as their strengths. It is tragic that these human capital capabilities are lost when employees leave the company.

Since thousands of years, the goal of capturing the collective wisdom of employees has been a dream. We have failed to achieve this goal 99.9% of the time. A lot of this was because we didn't have the right tools.

Many organizations began by writing down ideas on paper. These ideas evolved into more complicated work-flow management systems. These systems were all great but they were not'modifiable searchable, distributable, adaptive'. We recently created complex CRM systems that captured much of the company's client knowledge, but did not integrate the sales-cycle knowledge.

The Wiki has grown in popularity due to the invention of the internet and the many tools it provided. Wiki is a Hawaiian word that means "fast" in Hawaiian. Wikis are software that allows users to create, edit, and link pages online. Wikis are used to create collaborative websites and power community websites. Businesses are installing Wikis to offer affordable, effective Intranets and Knowledge Management.

Wikis can do things that other tools (hardware or soft-based) cannot. To capture this human knowledge, an organization must have a system that can modify, searchable, distributeable, and adaptive knowledge collection.

Companies that want to manage their knowledge and human capital have begun developing internal wikis. Wiki's are used by companies such as IBM, Citrix, Discovery Communications and Boston's College Gerald School of Information Management to identify, create and acquire information, store it, organize it, use it, and share it.

As organizations increasingly rely upon geographically dispersed workforces, there is a growing need to collaborate on projects that span multiple teams and have different time frames. This calls for brainstorming and collaboration. Wiki could be a powerful medium to enable asynchronous distributed collaboration in such circumstances," says Jonathan Davies, an expert in Wiki brainstorming.

Wiki deployment is being used by many organizations for project-specific management. These wikis will not replace other tools for client management and work-flow management. Instead, they will be used as an advanced resource to the knowledge-base that has been accumulated with these projects. These wiki's are easily modifiable by participants. This allows them to adapt the information to their projects and make it more effective. Each participant can decide how they want to use the technology, which creates collective value for the team.

Sun Computer Systems has been emphasizing for years that it is not computers that are valuable but the network. This is also true for the use and deployment of wikis within organisations. The group's value increases when the collective wisdom, cooperation, development, uses, and participation of all members are gathered.

The more knowledge an organization has, the more it retains, and the less it loses when someone leaves.

Are organizations required to use and deploy wikis? Not necessarily. It is not. Although wikis are not the only way to retain group knowledge, they will become more popular as more tools for collaboration and knowledge retention increase.