Constructivist media for policy documents
Fixed documents, blogs, and wikis have limitations for management of policy documents in organizations, says Jon Garfunkel of Boston, http://civilities.net/.
Garfunkel has worked to develop the next generation system for documentation that changes continually and is updated collaboratively. He calls the website for this work a “civ,” and has been using Drupal as the basis.
Garfunkel calls the overall project Constructive Media and reports how to apply the method to management of policies in the enterprise.
September 7th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
I’m glad to see wikis are getting traction in the quality management and techinical communication worlds. I’ve been experimenting with them for several years and I see two opportunities for wikis that have yet to be fully developed. The first opportunity has to do with content control. Wikis are famous, and notorious, for allowing anyone to post and edit content. While this is good at empowering the readers to update the content, it also presents problems, especially in regulated industries where management approval of P&P content is required by law. A wiki with an approval workflow built into the application is a huge opportunity. I haven’t seen this as an out-of-the-box feature yet and I believe it would further the adoption of wikis in the business world. The second opportunity has to do with traditional electronic document management systems (EDMS). EDMSs are entrenched in many organizations but it is often the case that documents are initially developed outside the EDMS and then imported as a complete first draft. A wiki is the perfect place to collaboratively develop these draft documents. The challenge is getting the wiki content, which is primarly web-based, into a document format such as Word. Some wikis offer a Save Page as Word File option, but the quality of the output (in terms of styles and adherence to good word processing practices) is poor at best. I think this could be another huge opportunities for wikis to gain market share in two ways… increasing the quality of wiki Save to Doc output and also the creation of a wiki module for EDMS systems such as Documentum or Master Control. For anyone interested in experiment with a wiki, here’s one that I’ve played with and like http://www.jotspot.com/ (no affiliation).