Thursday, June 7, 2007
Corporations embrace wikis
Sue Hildreth writes in “Computer World” about the benefits of social media for large organizations, specifically wikis as long-term information repositories.
" ‘After he left, his replacement showed me a stock he thought was interesting. I said, 'Wait a minute; we already researched that stock.'" The analyst who had left had researched the stock thoroughly and developed a strategy about when to buy it. "But do you think we could find that work? No way," Herrmann says. 'It was nowhere to be found.’We’ve seen blogging infiltrate corporate structures, and now wikis are following suit. Social media are another means for organizations to increase employee efficiency. Instead of e-mailing project documents between employees, wikis can act as a central place to deposit and edit information, technical plans, and project specifications.
Herrmann realized that a wiki — a collaborative Web site to which everyone can contribute content — might have prevented the loss.”
As Hermann mentions, there are a number of legal requirements surrounding communications that take place in corporate wikis and blogs. Record retention, e-discovery, and ensuring that sensitive information is not distributed are all issues that organizations must comply with when using wikis or blogs. Hildreth also comments:
" 'We like it because it's a peer review system, not a hierarchical system. We work in teams, each covering a sector, so this makes it easier to collaborate,' says Herrmann. 'We also wanted to do a better job of documenting and saving things that don't get saved, as part of our legal obligations.'"
“CIOs also have concerns about security, governance, IT support and integration of Web 2.0 applications with existing systems. And the very nature of Web 2.0 — distributed and egalitarian — makes some managers nervous. 'Web 2.0 is decentralized,' explains Schmelzer. ‘There’s no centralized authority to mandate or control.’”Techrigy’s SM2 does just that. SM2 provides a central system to help enterprises discover which employees are using social media inside the organization and from home, record those communications for record retention and e-discovery, and monitor these communications to ensure that social media are complying with company policies and that liabilities and organizational risks are not being created. Hopefully, with SM2’s compliance management, organizations won’t be afraid of implementing blogs and wikis, and they’ll be able to take advantage of these fantastic technologies.
Posted by Adam Steinberg @ 10:16 AM 
