TamTamy Blog

In the previous post we saw which methods can be followed by every employee and department manager. Here we discuss which tools offered by the company itself can fight the excess of daily emails. In this post we will start from a model we have already analyzed in this blog: the wiki.

Putting a corporate wiki at your employees’ disposal and encouraging them to use it generates a deeper feeling of belonging and attachment to a project in every person directly or indirectly involved, and it also facilitates communications, causing reactions in a first phase before the product is completed and, in a way, irreversible.
Let us take a closer look.

As we have already said, people’s involvement increases as everybody, through a personal account, can be informed and inform those around him or her, directly accessing the pages of one or more projects. The overall picture is finally offered also to the last links of the chain, still keeping them committed with their micro/macro activities, and not only to those who follow the project from above with a function of coordination. The roles are still the same, but in a way they are levelled and everybody can physically or emotionally participate in other people’s activities, creating a big, common project.

Let us go now into the subject of email. While with the old view it would have been necessary to create a thread of mails between groups of people – consequently excluding others and giving up the idea of sharing – now all comments can be expressed directly within the wiki. They may well even come from departments that are not directly involved or made reference to, but that can still give a value added with their expertise or act as if they were the consumers.

In this way, a project will take shape, maybe going out of the initial limits we had set, to become something better that we hadn’t considered in these new terms. This will be possible and real only when companies decide not to build walls, but rather they will believe in the model of sharing and achievement of a common objective, as TamTamy has done with its wiki and the other tools offered with its service.

The preference given to the use of wikis instead of email, moreover, will also make project management easier for all sectors. The problem of a never received mail, of a too heavy attachment, of the one gone lost in the chaos of hundreds – or thousands – emails received, will no longer exist, or at least it will be mostly limited.

Email is still a useful and indispensable tool, but not always irreplaceable.

In the previous post we introduced the concept of wiki and highlighted its main characteristics, which make it particularly suitable for the use by groups. A workgroup can in fact manage every single user’s potentialities and contributions at the best. Every user can create his/her own contents and modify or comment on the contents of some other colleague.

The centralization of the documents produced and the possibility for more users to work on them makes the wiki a good substitute for many emails. As already said before, a smaller use of email leads to a much higher efficiency of the tool.
With wikis it is possible to implement several solutions, such as project management, to-do lists, planners for event management or even a platform for asynchronous brainstorming, shared by different users in different moments.

A wiki is a virtual space where people can share ideas and collaborate to the social creation of knowledge, and where collective intelligence can be expressed at its best. Something which is constantly changing and, we dare say, improving according to the principle that “the wisdom of many is better than the thought of the single”.

Whatever the use we want to make of it, be it building a web site for internal use or a help desk for our customers, the wiki represents one of the most powerful tools that platforms such as TamTamy put at our disposal.
For this reason, I invite you to try it. Go to the TamTamy site and register for free to have immediate access to a complete platform to start using Web 2.0 tools in your company.