Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

I took 30 mins out this afternoon to write 2 upcoming (and one, ahem, late) greetings cards to my family in the UK. (Tidbit: Sending cards is a custom in the UK far more common custom than here in Canada)

Anyhow. So I did the selections, payments etc, for the first two. I was using remind4u.com which is a latecomer on the scene in the UK behind moonpig.com, with fewer features. But remind4u.com have cheaper prices and a good selection and besides, I believe enough in competition even if it does mean I have to re-enter some addresses. The first 2 purchases went well, but payment failed on the 3rd, and remind4u.com is now giving me server errors.

What a pain. That means I have to remember 1) to continue and 2) where to continue from 3) likely start over. Luckily it gives me impetus to talk about wiki’s in the enterprise…

I’ve long argued on TWiki.org that the thing wikis are best for is brainstorming to creating new process. I’ve also argued that workflow is the next frontier for wikis. Without workflow there’s nothing to get me on the track of a process. Without process I am doomed to have to reinvent the new steps for old tasks.

TWiki does a good job of providing structured data, but it provides little in the way to help processes do repeatable actions to that repeatable data. And repeatability powers efficiency.

If wikis are to create emergence of new processes from chaos, and power innovation, they must have workflow. This will help people become quickly adept at acheiving success in new processes, not just collaboratively design them.

So. Back to my old trusty workflow system. I’ve booked in my Treo (Phone Diary) another 10 mins in tomorrow’s afternoon schedule to remind myself to finish the transaction. And if the transaction from remind4u has disappeared, well, I’ll just have a stronger case for continuing to use moonpig.com instead.

Wikis? Well the vendors ought find a solution to workflow. The wiki/intranet/portal market is picking up and workflow is going to be a differentiator now and a must-have later.

And let’s see whether remind4u.com is smart enough to remind me that my transaction was aborted.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Efficiency, Wiki, Culture, moonpig, Workflow, remind4u, Middleware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.