Richard MacManus is looking at building blogs and wikis into his organization. Read/Write Web: The Passion of the Information Flow
I've begun the push to introduce wiki and weblog technologies into the company I work for. As I wrote in my last post, I'm aiming to enhance Information Flow within my company. There is some initial skepticism from my colleagues about wikis and weblogs, but mainly due to unfamiliarity with these tools. For example, one concern is of the unstructured nature of Wikis when compared to the highly-structured nature of Content Management Systems. Wikis and Weblogs are often seen by people as being replacements for Content Management and Document Management Systems. And in a sense it is a choice between two types of Knowledge Management: Bottom-Up (wikis/weblogs) vs Top-Down (CMS's, Doc Mgmt). But right now I see wikis/weblogs as being complimentary to CMS's and Doc Mgmt systems - not replacements. There is still a need for structured information in a corporate setting and probably there always will be, but what wikis and weblogs potentially bring to the table is collaboration and a publish-subscribe culture.
He's got a lot of good thinking going on, particularly around the idea of using these technologies to help enable emerging knowledge within the organization. He also comments that wikis and weblogs are not antithetical to enterprise content management or document management. These systems should be complementary, as they serve different purposes. The enterprise systems tend to deal with set-in-stone information and documentation that needs to be retained under specific control mechanisms. Wikis and blogs help people get to the point where they might be able to create practices and products that end up in the enterprise systems.
There are several others who have extended this conversation via trackbacks to the post.