SwirrlSpeak

I’ve just finished reading Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

In all, I thought it was a good read with some great insights into how business is evolving, but the edition I read was published in 2006 and such is the rate of developments in this area, some references and examples felt dated. (It looks like there is a new version available, published in 2008, which may address this).

The premise of the book is that in general, sharing is good for business, not just within your own organisation, but also between organisations. The old web was one-way, but web 2.0 (or the ‘new web’ as the authors of the book refer to it), is all about community and participation.

Tapscott and Williams argue that people prefer participation over passiveness, and software such as wikis helps in this regard, empowering people with different areas of authority and expertise to collaborate for better results.

They also take an interesting slant on Coase’s Law (i.e. firms expand until the costs of performing an action inside the firm become equal to carrying out that action on the open market), asserting that it should now be read ‘in reverse’. So, now, companies should shrink until the cost of performing an action internally no longer exceeds performing it externally. Why develop software internally, or design bespoke software when you can buy off-the-shelf products which often perform the function just as well (if not better), at a fraction of the cost?

Since the rise of the internet and the knowledge-based economy, there has been a shift in the workplace from closed and hierarchical structures to more self-organised networks, often distributed geographically. If people don’t have right tools available to collaborate, they will use whatever they can find at their disposal. Surely it’s better to foster this collaboration mentality from the outset, providing your workforce with the right tools to do the job?

Wiki-based tools, like Swirrl, allow the people who understand the domain to decide how they collaborate: it is hard to force people to do something that they don’t want to do. Wikis enable collaboration in an enjoyable, natural way, and most importantly it’s hassle-free. With wikis, you aren’t forcing your employees into unnatural workflows, and they help distribute the burden of organisation, avoiding bottlenecks, something the authors of the book compare to “parallel processing for people”.

(Wiki-wiki bus photo by Andrew Laing)