Sunday, November 30, 2008

A KM Experience Reaches My Sister

My sister has been very interested in what I am learning in this KM class from the first day in September. She is working at a small internet start-up company doing search-engine optimization, and has always made it a priority to learn the latest and greatest on the internet. The company she is working at is called Yodle, and is based on a school project designed at the Warton School of Business. At the ripe young age of 26, the founder uses many technologically advanced techniques in making his business run as efficiently as possible. Just this past week, she mentioned that all the stuff I have told her about in my class is coming to Yodle!

Apparently the company is starting their own wiki in order to make it easier for the employees to contact people for advice on how to better handle clients. They created the wiki to store things like powerpoint slides made for presentations and things that they generally don't know where to store. In addition to file storage and advice sections, they wiki is also going to act as a social networking site. The employees already have a contact directory that lists the accounts that everyone has, but the wiki is adding a section for every employee to list some things about themselves "to make employees feel more comfortable contacting people they don't know." 

The interesting thing about this wiki though, is that not all employees can have access to change things. The employees have to go through an administrator to update anything. My first question when hearing this was "Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a wiki?" But after thinking about it some more, it seems the wiki isn't being used for the same purposes we have discussed in class, although it does take advantage of the enormous flexibility. Yodle is using a wiki as a kind of internal portal, but I wonder how this will evolve in the coming years as Yodle's clients and problems grow.  Any thoughts?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wikis, as you said are mainly highlighted for the independency in updating & rectifying the information fed/uploaded. Keeping an Administrator to control/monitor the activities of Wiki, will create confusion abouit the sole purpose of a Wiki.

Karthik said...

Wikis, as you said are mainly highlighted for the independency in updating & rectifying the information fed/uploaded. Keeping an Administrator to control/monitor the activities of Wiki, will create confusion abouit the sole purpose of a Wiki.