The McKinsey Quarterly recently released an article, Eight business technology trends to watch (Free login required), which includes a great section on delivering content that has been created by a group of people. They call this Distributing Cocreation and while the examples they use range from the building of the Linux operating system to Loncin, a Chinese motorcycle manufacturer, the core of the discussion is summed up nicely in the section's opening sentence:"The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries."
If you are part of a distributed team using a wiki to collaborate on anything from new product development to customer support, you already know this statement to be true. Wikis and wiki-type software can be very powerful, used to not only keep everyone up to date on all aspects of work on a project, but also to have a place where everyone can contribute the expertise and perspective that others will find valuable.
The authors go on to say: "By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control."
Using the open nature of a wiki, allowing everyone to contribute towards building a better product (customer support information, product documentation, etc.) is an easy way not only to harness the collective intelligence of your employees, but also can provide a way to leverage the knowledge of your partners as well. Your partners can offer very specialized, highly relevant, extremely valuable information- which you can store in the context of your own knowledge. So, having a centralized system to help gather and leverage this knowledge can pay huge dividends.
Knowledge 'Gatekeepers' (the select few people in the organization who capture, document, and report on the knowledge) can be barriers to collaboration if they are overwhelmed or if there are not efficient processes to get information to them. A true collaborative environment ensures that knowledge is managed quickly and that the knowledge itself is accurate and current.
