The following article first appeared in Edition 1 of the Adaptavist newspaper.

Wikis are designed to break down barriers to adoption and contribution. The whole purpose of a wiki is to simplify the process of adding and editing content. So a discussion of processes and workflows in the context of wikis may sound unusual and even counter-intuitive - surely it’s adding more process?

However, even in the most agile of organizations, people follow steps: help text is reviewed before it is shown to the public, features need peer-approval, and proposals go through multiple review iterations before being presented to a sponsor.

In larger organizations, networks of processes are everywhere: Primarily to delineate work between workers and departments with different specializations, but also to satisfy a multitude of internal controls, to monitor outcomes and ensure compliance.

All organizations need processes. Processes deliver on promises such as contracts, confidentiality and to reduce re-occurrences of prior mistakes. We assert that wikis are more useful and deliver greater value when strengthened with workflows.

The Wiki Way: Ward’s Principles and Wikinomics in action

Wikis have earned their corner in the enterprise as an effective mechanism for online knowledge sharing and for maintaining the coherence in sets of knowledge. And, despite industry pundit predictions, wikis have proved they can exist without chaos, confidentiality and political problems.

Ward Cunningham defined design principles of wikis key to the advancement of content: readers can write on or rewrite any page, that demand for new pages can be expressed, and that edits of navigation elements should be readily changeable along with edits themselves.

Wikinomics heralded successes of Open Collaboration: scenarios in which flexible, peer-based communication and distributed decision-making transcend the boundaries of the firm. Open collaboration bestows leaders with the resources to tap external expertise, motivation and capacity in response to market opportunities. Firms mastering open collaboration orchestrate the exploration and exploitation of innovations outside the firm and to then build and integrate networks, strategies and technologies that sustain these advantages as ongoing capabilities.

We believe that adding workflow, tightly coupled to Confluence page model and built mindfully using Ward’s design principles, strengthens Confluence as a full-service offering in the collaboration technologies industry.

How do organizations with Confluence deal with processes?

Practically every organization needs processes, but Confluence provides few tools in support. For seldom-run processes, a team can typically just document steps. As complexity or frequency increases, the approach often changes to a combination of labels and reports. Beyond a certain point many firms resort to external applications such JIRA. Organizations anticipating issue often avoid Confluence altogether for it’s lack of process support.

Each of these approaches have disadvantages. Documentation is too separate and tedious to maintain. Technical configuration presents too steep a learning- curve, making changes inaccessible the average user, and especially as complexity of the problem increases or the collaboration scenario shifts. External applications create a fragmented experience for the user. Switching between approaches causes cost, delay, data issues and user exasperation. In sum, all such workarounds drag the competitiveness of firms.

Processes the Wiki Way

We believe Ward’s wiki design principles can be, and should be, applied to processes, and that doing so will open up Confluence to broader use-cases and more demanding markets. Every person related to the organization has perspective or insight, and whereas wikis provide flexible input to the content, Workflows the Wiki Way invites participants to provide input, feedback or rework to the intermesh of work-step sequences. Input can be in response to new customer problems or enhanced partner capability yet still maintain interlocking checks and satisfy existing reporting needs.

Comalatech has built a workflow plugin for Confluence founded on the belief that wiki principles can also apply to processes, that any user should be able to define a process to simplify work patterns for themselves or for working with others.

Workflows for Confluence

Since 2007, Comalatech has provided workflow capabilities for Confluence. Our product provides the means to model states, tasks and approvals using page as records and provides easy ways to expire content and to keep it evergreen.

Our March 2010 release is user-interface driven, making workflows quick to create, use and modify. In this way we’ve re- embraced Ward’s design principles: workflow definitions are permeable and co-evolutionable by end-users and universal because now anyone (not just programmers) can create and change workflows. You can allow peers to incrementally define and reuse processes. By shifting processes into the wiki, and by enabling construction, feedback and modification by any end-user, Confluence participants can collaborate not just on documentation but so too on the steps that make up work to be done.

There’s a Workflow for that!

We’ve seen our plugin used for a multitude of purposes including Policy management, Technical Documentation, Loan Approvals, Expenses, ISO 9001 Document Management, Requirements Management and Systems Development Life Cycle.

Ad Hoc Workflows for Confluence contains an extensive workflow engine, able to model and report on tasks, states, triggers and transitions coupled with simple-to-use workflow learning. Our plugin learns when your business rules change so you can template and reapply a new sequence of user interactions. In addition we have a new modelling environment in which you can inspect and graphically model a workflow.

Our May 2010 release introduces a Workflow Repository, a site from which Workflow Templates can be shared. From here you can download our Content Evergreen, Multi-step Approvals and various industry-specific flows. We are presently setting up the means for company managers and process specialists to share their workflows to our community.

Comalatech

Organizations must evolve to survive, and the more nimbly they do so the more they thrive. Organisations with both the leadership vision and ability to mobilize it’s resources swiftly earn the title of Adaptive Organizations. Comalatech brings Workflows the Wiki Way into Atlassian Confluence. We offer flexible process-tools that empower competitive adaptiveness through process agility.

For small organizations adding our lightweight processes will help you achieve stability, speed up work and free your founders from administrative burden. For larger organizations our Wiki Workflows add flexibility to your processes, and by enabling rapid feedback and modifications on the workflow, creates organizational flexibility to not only spot opportunity, but quickly formulate vision, realign capabilities and engage staff in a process-channeled way.