denotes premium content | Jul 31 2010 News
posted 9 May 2006
Blogs and wikis ‘ten years in the making’
By
Blogs and wikis are nothing new, says JP Rangaswami, former head of IT and chief information officer at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DKW) – because DKW has been doing it since 1995.
That is the message Rangaswami, now head of alternative market models at the bank, delivered to the Social Networking Forum in
DKW’s blog and wiki tools are largely based on freely available open-source software, such as Twiki and B2Evolution, which can be customised to the organisation’s needs, but it also purchases software to meet niche requirements as well.
However, although the initiatives were started as long as a decade ago, policies covering the appropriate use of blogs and wikis by staff were only developed in the past year. "Most of the interested people got together and the guy most interested in it wrote the policy," says Rangaswami.
This document was then passed around among the bloggers and big wiki users for comments and editing, before being put before the appropriate committee at DKW for its approval. DKW’s approach mirrors that taken by the BBC when it implemented such ‘social software’ as part of a wider knowledge-management strategy pioneered by Euan Semple (see Inside Knowledge, March 2006). It set up a wiki and invited all interested parties to contribute to it. The finished article was then passed to management for approval.
