Blogs and wikis and work - oh my!

The Learning & Education team at my workplace, of which I am part, likes to be on the "leading edge," rather than the "bleeding edge" of learning technologies. By this, I mean that although we want to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the use of newer technologies to enhance learning and performance management, we also recognize that there must be a sound business case for inclusion of these new tools. Additionally, we must be able to ensure that use of new technologies will not impact our compliance with the many, many regulations that govern the accounting profession.

For those reasons, our use of wikis and blogs has been pretty limited. We have team wikis that support the use of learning technologies (makes sense, right?), because that information falls into the safe zone, and is accessible only by those of us in the L&E group. A series of coaching videos were produced last year, with real staff playing various made up roles scripted to discuss very realistic coaching sessions. These videos were accompanied by a blog written by one of the characters - so, it was fictitious, but also very realistic. I liked the inclusion of this piece to the overall series rollout. So far, we've really only tapped the surface with the use of these tools.

Although not technically a blog or wiki, we do have team sites that can be used for collaboration. On these sites, a team can post notes, documents, schedule meetings, and such, and these have been helpful in allowing all members of a team to contribute to different tasks. I do feel these sites are being somewhat underutilized, possibly because they exist outside our firewall (for the purpose of collaborating with clients as well) and many people don't yet have a comfort level that the sites meet our requirements for information security. Any breach of confidential information would be devastating to the firm's reputation, so we definitely err on the side of caution. I think that our leadership and staff need slightly better education when it comes to understanding what's safe and what isn't in the technologies we use. Perhaps then we can move ahead and seize the opportunities we have to increase our use of these tools.