Take this sheet of paper away or I’ll quit

This guy is called Wiki Image by Getty Images via Daylife

My boss asked me yesterday to print something I was working on and file it as a hardcopy. “So that we have it for sure.” If she does that ever again, I will have to quit.

The problem was even bigger: She was concerned about archiving, security and revision history of contents on the intranet. “How can we make sure, that we have all changes documented, that we can also add notes on why which changes were made and with whom they were agreed.”

She suggested to print every document that is to be published on the intranet, put handwritten notes on it and file it. There are about 1000 new documents per year and another 1000 updates. That easily adds up to 12000 to 15000 pages per year that would have to be printed, commented and filed. And we are not even talking about retrieving something in there…

I was horrified.

I just managed to remove every piece of paper from my desk (except some post its, but I hardly used them since I use deadlineapp, netvibes or iGoogle).

I had planned to handle all workflow, versioning and archiving issues in a new cms-workflow that was supposed to come along with a generally remodeled intranet. This project was cancelled because of budget reasons.

In my horror, I now suggested to use a wiki instead.

I’m curious how far I can take that. There will be discussions with authors, editors, internal audit, IT security and of course users. There will be heavy rights management work, intense process and permission design and lots of documentation work for users.

But the most important issue to me: what can I do to build trust?

Many users think of Wikis as anything goes, laissez faire, informal stuff that is not suited for real business use.

What can you tell an internal audit colleague questioning you about how reliable the built-in usermanagement really is, and how you can prove, that the permission setting really work?

And how should you behave in a discussion with people telling you that they don’t want to store business critical information in open source software?

However, I started prototyping last night. And I’m more willing to go through these discussion marathons then to play with paper. If this does not work out, I will have to intensely reorganize something. In which direction whatsoever.

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