Dr. Biren Saraiya, MD has a good, detailed post on his experiences
with using blogs, wikis, and other technologies over at the SAHRI blog
(a non-profit). I love to see both frank positives and negatives about
the use of different technologies by real practitioners. Technology
companies cannot build products in vacuums, and his comments are great
feedback.
What is very important about introducing technologies is getting the
context right. Although I love to push technology (since I work for a
blog vendor), the management consultant in me actually comes first -
that means you have to try to understand a problem first before you can
try to solve it. The work structure for SAHRI that that Dr. Saraiya
conveyed to me about his organization is key to understanding what will
work and what won't for his org:
--- our collaborators will be geographically disconnected --- our collaborators will have busy (limited time for synchronous collaboration) --- it will be long term committments (for any given project) --- most of them will be technologically naive.
Another key to think about here, which is not discussed, is to
figure out where to get leverage. It is often very hard to do this in
non-profit environments. That said, a systematic shakedown or analysis
of which levers create the biggest bang for the buck is worthwhile.
Inexpensive communication and collaboration tools like blogs, wikis,
and audio conferencing seemed to provide great benefit for very low
entry-costs and minimal risk.
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