Our business world is changing and the role of training is changing as well. We see employees, partners, and customers becoming increasing responsible for their own development and more comfortable with technology. The pace of business is increasing with less tolerance for wasted time or resources. New products and processes are being introduced faster than ever and the business world has become increasingly competitive with no room for mistakes or false starts.
These changes in today’s business environment are forcing us to rethink how we maintain a skilled and knowledgeable workforce as well as how our workforce can help us develop and maintain competitive advantage.
The introduction, maturation, and wide spread acceptance of e-Learning, productivity, and communication technologies offer businesses an efficient as well as cost effective alternative to traditional workforce skills development methods. In addition, these new technologies offer businesses new opportunities to reach and service their customers. In our newsletter will discuss the new e-Learning and communication technologies and how they can become essential tools for success in today’s business environment.
Let’s begin our discussion with a question. What in the world is a wiki and what does it have to do with training?
Funny you should ask. I was just having breakfast this week with a business associate who told me that his company had implemented a program where employees could freely post information to a company website that was accessible by everyone in the company. The information you could post included text, graphics, and even videos. I shuddered and immediately imagined the mayhem this would create. It seemed like such a really bad idea. I had visions of bad poetry, worse novels, vacation pictures, baby videos, pets diving into wading pools, and a video of Uncle Jack singing Jingle Bells.
Well, as is the case, more often than I would ever care to admit, I was wrong. In my family, we call that the “W” word and no one ever wants to have it cross their lips. But we’re all friends here so don’t tell anyone else I said it.
But, let’s get back to the point. Traditionally, training has been in the format of instructor led courses, self-paced learning, or perhaps even general reference material. This information was initiated, deployed, stored, and retrieved as structured information with a purpose and defined business objective. This was well and good but what about the huge body of useful information and experiences that is part of each individual’s company experience. That is the anecdotal best practices that are part of every informal corporate knowledge base. Would the capture and availability of this information be of value to overall corporate performance?
I think it would be valuable and so enter the wiki.
A wiki is a web site with capabilities that enable non-technical individuals to post information on an ad hoc and informal basis. The most widely known public wiki is called Wikipedia and is reputedly the world’s largest encyclopedia. The large volume of information stored at Wikipedia was put there by an informal user community and not Wikipedia employees. Going back to my original fears, is this an open invitation for everyone to post vacation pictures?
Perhaps, but more importantly it is an opportunity to capture and make available a wide variety of valuable information at virtually no cost. The challenge of implementing and managing this type of technology and process is controlling the volume, relevance, and accuracy of the posted content. It is a new way of thinking about information because there will have to be a certain tolerance for inaccuracy. But what if this gets out of hand you ask? If content authors are public and Wiki input is confined to employees, it is my guess that normal business conventions will prevail and employees will behave responsibly.
So how are businesses using wiki’s? They are being used for business discussion, project management, process introduction, and a variety of other applications that leverage resources by facilitating communication and the sharing of knowledge.
Comments