http://stc-on.org/quality/departments/news-quality-and-process/2006/09/03/constructivist-media-for-policy-documents/ News and information from the QPI SIG, Society for Technical Communication Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:54:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.2 http://stc-on.org/quality/departments/news-quality-and-process/2006/09/03/constructivist-media-for-policy-documents/#comment-52 Thu, 07 Sep 2006 18:16:06 +0000 http://stc-on.org/quality/departments/news-quality-and-process/2006/09/03/constructivist-media-for-policy-documents/#comment-52 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). 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).

]]>