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COVER STORY/TECHNOLOGY
Working in Wiki: Team Play
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A Pennsylvania county puts its IT projects to the wiki test.
The whole Wikipedia-Google generation is coming past us like gangbusters," says Jack Pond, the chief information officer for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. His aim is to keep up — to adapt his county and its agencies to new Web technologies. So far, that's meant an online system where employees can share ideas and thoughts on IT projects while they're being built. But the system — a wiki-based approach — is not just for the IT staff. It's also for employees throughout the enterprise who will use the new technology in their jobs and for the vendors who are developing it and will tinker with it once it's in place.
The desire to collaborate with all stakeholders started four years ago, when Pond arrived on the job. He inherited four major projects, one of which was to implement an ERP system. Many a CIO and project manager have built ERP systems, turned them on and then cowered while complaints rained down on them.
To avoid the usual fallout, Pond tried what he calls the agile approach: The IT department delivered functionality one bit at a time. That gave users, IT employees and vendors a chance to work together to fix and improve things as each bit went into place. Bottom line: The ERP project came in under budget and in less than the allotted time.
Now Pond is moving his agile approach to the wiki world. It is currently being used to great effect as the region around Montgomery County develops its Law Enforcement Justice Information-Sharing System, or LEJIS. The idea behind LEJIS was to develop a home for court documents that would be accessible to various arms of the court system. In assembling LEJIS, the need for online collaboration was clear: Five county CIOs and multiple district attorney office IT directors are actively working on the project, and the vendor's personnel are stationed in offices that are spread out over five cities in three states. Moreover, district attorneys who will be using the new system work out of offices all across the state, and 24 police departments in various locations are expected to post incidents on it.
Although everyone was collaborating before a wiki was set up, the wiki made it easier for people to share what they knew and what they were experiencing. In its earliest incarnation, the wiki was for the technical team to communicate about requirements. Now, there are pages for other users, including a page for the police departments to give feedback.
Since most of the county's police officers weren't savvy about wikis when the program was set up, they were offered orientation and training. Still, they didn't head in droves to participate. To encourage their participation, Pond showed up at one of their meetings at the Norristown Fire Academy and projected on the wall a larger-than-life version of the wiki. He brought up a new entry that showed which police departments were live and connected to the incident-reporting system. That piqued the interest of officers who hadn't yet taken the time to explore the system. Now, they could see what their stake was in the new system and how the collaborative tool could help them keep up its progress.
Wiki collaboration doesn't necessarily end when a project is up and running. Users now have a place to share requests and complaints about how well a new IT system is working and what more they'd like out of it in the future. They do this via software called Bugzilla, a free "bug-tracking" system that allows people to track outstanding bugs they've discovered in a product.
Bugzilla can put vendors and users on the same electronic page. Montgomery County previously used a spreadsheet approach. People identified an issue and wrote a description of it. Next to that went the steps that had to be taken to cure the ill and the name of the person responsible for taking those steps. It was updated each week and discussed at a status meeting.
But waiting a week for a status meeting created a lag time between when the problem was discovered and when it was addressed. It could take days or weeks after finding it to fix the problem. In the wiki world, someone can enter a description of a problem and technicians can be assigned to fix it immediately.
At one point in the LEJIS project, a vendor complained to a police chief about feeling exposed because the system's problems were posted for all to see. The police chief responded that the best way not to have technical problems posted was to fix them right away. The wiki, says Pond, "became a leverage tool."
Second of five parts: 1 2 3 4 5 Single Page