Helix Commerce and IBM: Blogs and Wikis in Business

Note: I no longer work with Helix Commerce.

Some of my readers will know me from presenting with Bill Ives at KMWorld on the topic of Blogs and Wikis. Well, Bill, Cindy and I have teamed with IBM to provide a training version for corporations and the public.

Here’s an extract from our marketing literature:

Blogs and Wikis in Business: A New Training Course!

Blogs are in the news with increasing frequency. Fortune Magazine named blogging in the top ten business technology trends, and the Harvard Business Review included business blogs in their list of breakthrough ideas. They have made the cover of Business Week and other leading publications. The combination of accessibility, transparency, and archiving that blogs provide has the potential to enrich business communication.

Many firms are also turning to wikis. Their collaborative capabilities align with the rise of project teams as an organizing principle in business processes. Because of their unrestricted editing capabilities wikis foster group thinking and work best within a trusted community. For these reasons, they become an indispensable team tool.

What can blogs and wikis bring to business communication, learning, and knowledge management? How are successful early adopters using them?

IBM leads the way with Canada’s first Web 2.0, wiki and blog training course, delivered to you by the practitioners at Helix Commerce International.

When we sent the campaign, a customer asked IBM whether “this course is theoretical or [whether] there are some hands-on exercises.” See my answer, after the jump… (Or to read at IBM.com or to register)

This course tackles these questions and addresses the use of blogs and wikis for marketing, customer communication, internal communication, project management, collaboration, learning, and knowledge management.

The session is designed to promote questions and conversation and address specific issues raised by the attendees. Practical business examples are used throughout to illustrate key concepts and applications.

Audience

This is a basic course for a managers, supervisors, project leaders who need to enhance customer connections, establish thought leadership in their market, enable better internal team communication and collaboration, foster innovation, expand their knowledge management capabilities, employ new learning methods, and provide employees with better access to the knowledge gained through daily job related interactions. Individuals who are interested in what blogs and wikis are about and how they can help their business.

So, is his course is theoretical or are there are some hands-on exercises?

In the wiki part of the course there are hands-on exercises throughout. For example, I start by getting people to write up a profile about themselves and to then talk to their neighbors about themselves, what they want from the course and what they have learnt from their peers. I take them through hands-on collaboratively editing such content to increase the quantity and linkage, and, in particular, how editing one other’s pages improves the signal-to-noise ratio by clarifying context to the point of satisfaction to be understandable by all.

I then cover ideas of organizational transparency, and relate how a wiki increases idea flow and personnel connection within the enterprise. We’ll cover engagement and motivation, showing how being able to interact and build on each other’s work transforms the nature of traditional command and control paradigm and how this achieves new agility and dynamics in the marketplace.

In short, I connect day-to-day work using a wiki with a means to power, align-to, and shape, corporate strategy.

More detail can be found at IBM.com, or to register

Note: I no longer work with Helix Commerce.