Enterprise 2.0: And how wikis can help organisations better communicate internally

A colleague recently asked me how her clients can integrate social media and web 2.0 into their organisations in order to more effectively work on collaborative projects across mobile workforces. What tools help close geographical borders within organisations? Are there easier ways to communicate other than back-and-forth email, telephone and IM that helps employees share work internally? I figured I would address these questions in a public forum.

As we all know and have heard time and time again, the use of web 2.0 tools in the enterprise is becoming more important and increasingly evident. It facilitates an environment where workers are less constrained by geographic borders, allowing them to communicate and collaborate across dispersed workforces (whether it be different offices, states, countries with relative ease).

There are particular tools that give employees have access to content that helps them be more productive in their job function. Tools such as wikis are helping organisations promote and share talent, IP, experience, case studies, learnings and so forth.

I would make the suggestion for organisations wishing to foster a culture of sharing and collaboration that they take a plunge by implementing an internal Wiki. A wiki is a site that allows you to create, edit and share content easily with one another. A great example is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia created and edited by citizen journalists (you and me).

An internal wiki would allow employees to manage work documents efficiently. Allows one to create, edit and link documents that they’re working on. This allows you to track a history of changes to documents and the people that made particular changes. It's a much more efficient and user-friendly system - and is definitely easier than storing down multiple versions of the same document.

This about the documents that you have saved to your work folders. I guarantee if you're anything like me that you have versions titled .final, .FINALFINAL, .v2, .v3, .v3LK_edits and the list goes on. Every Tom, Dick and Harry adds their flavour to a press release (for example) and all of a sudden you are stretched to figure out which is the 'REAL' final document.

From my knowledge as well, a company intranet can be hosted on a wiki - although I look to my blogging community to back me up or knock me down on this one. 

Another fabulous Web 2.0 tool is RSS or 'Real Simple Syndication'. I would have to say that this is one of the most underestimated tools to date. It complements other Web 2.0 tools. For example, using an internal wiki, all employees would be able to subscribe to an RSS feed - which is basically a web feeds. This means if changes are made to the wiki, the new content would be sent directly to the employee (can be in the form of an email update) with a link and possibly even a summary of the content changes. This enables employees to decide whether they want to click through to the site. This means that employees do not have to manually log on to the wiki every so often to check whether amends to internal documents have made been made.

I’d like to build a list of wiki software that exists in Australia (and costs). If anyone has any insight, I invite you to share them with me.