Like Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace, another phenomenon is rapidly approaching the online world; only this time it is all about ‘Business Solutions’.  Just as these other services provide freedom and control over ones online works, so does the Wiki provide the same in a business environment. 

In an article published in Business Week “Something Wiki This Way Comes”, the author cites three examples of how Wikis are transforming the corporate environment.  The first example is of a software maker in Stamford Connecticut where the wiki provides a more efficient way of collaborating;

“Two dozen of the company’s 100 employees use them (wikis) to brainstorm, track projects, write and edit documentation, and coordinate marketing. That has eliminated countless meetings, conference calls, and back-and-forth e-mails. Says Pisarro: ‘Wikis allow this collaboration much better than anything else, so we get things done faster.’ ”

 
The article goes on to say how the wiki is becoming a significant contributor in the workplace as a “potent force for change — in this case, in the way people work.”  Further, the article cites a start-up which uses wikis to collaborate with overseas staff;

"Nowhere is that potential more apparent than in today’s far-flung, time-pressed corporate teams. Aaron Burcell, director of marketing for e-mail software startup Stata Laboratories Inc., says working on a wiki has cut the daily phone calls he made on a raft of projects to one a week. It also has allowed Stata to outsource more work, such as engineering, to India. Says Burcell: "I could justify the cost of the wiki just from the lower teleconferencing bills."

 
In the final example, the article speaks of wikis as a means to engage the customer.  As a Kodak executive stated that wikis could be used “to let relatives and friends contribute stories about photos in their collections.”

It is abundantly clear that the workplace can and should be improved with the use of wikis such as the Business-Grade solutions offered by CoActLive.

One doesn’t usually think of Wiki’s when thinking of the United Nations but in a recent article in Newsweek (read the article) it was reported that, the United Nations "…has embraced a once fringe social technology—the wiki—in hopes that it will help staff in 80 countries share information and reach consensus with less deliberation and more speed."

The article further explains,

Wiki software—easy-to-use programs that let anyone with Internet access create, remove and edit content on a Web page—first gained popularity thanks to Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia that has come to be hailed as one of the Web’s greatest resources. Now the technology is increasingly spreading outside the world of tech geeks and into the mainstream, being adopted by workplaces, corporations and even governments.

This is great news for Enterprise Wiki’s such as CoActLive where the emphasis is on ease-of-use and focused business-grade services.  With companies in the mainstream beginning to embrace this technology with solutions similar to the United Nations effort, CoActLive is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this growth trend in a worldwide industry.

In what has been identified as the wiki workplace " … a growing number of organizations have begun shifting from traditional hierarchical structures to self-organized and collaborative networks, using wiki software—a basket of technologies that include wikis, blogs and other tools—to foster innovation across organizational and geographic boundaries." 

The article further states, "Executives say the new tools make it easier for teams to collaborate and share information, and to get projects up and running on the fly. ‘Collaborative software has become a very important part of how businesses will invent and innovate,’ says Ken Bisconti, IBM’s vice president of messaging and collaboration software."

There is no doubt, we are headed toward a wiki-enabled workplace!