I just got off the phone with Daniel Green, an Australian living in Tel Aviv, Israel. Daniel works for Wikistrat, a collaboration consultancy for Israel's national security sector. The Comalatech team met Daniel at Atlas Camp - Atlassian's annual developer conference – where he proceeded to lament how, for all Confluence's fine content production and collaboration features, Confluence was unsuitable for a number of their projects. Exploring the matter over a few glasses of fine Rioja at San Francisco's B44, Roberto and I made things clear. Six months later, we're elated to report Daniel's successes.

Chief Technology Officer of Wikistrat, Daniel Green, has been using wikis for about 5 years. After experimenting with Docuwiki and Mediawiki, Daniel selected Confluence because it is an enterprise class technology backed by Java, and it's robust programming environment.

Approvals workflow Published page Workflow report

National Security: Permissions can't implement Need to Know requirements

• Services - Wikistrat provides consultancy to organisations, primarily in the national security, political risk and global strategy space.
• Product - Wikistrat offers subscriptions to their own wiki containing interactive strategic insight and scenario planning for worldwide political events

Dan stressed to me that in this context with stringent "need-to-know" requirements - far stricter than most industries, Wikistrat must diligently manage every flow of their information. Not only must the right collaborators be picked, vetted, and authorized, but information then contributed needs to analysed, with a decision of who should be informed of what, and using what timing. Wikistrat provides deep political insight into many regions including the troubled Middle East: passing incomplete information has consequences. Daniel's concerns were that Confluence's permissions system is too blunt and simplistic, entailing unacceptable risks.

Today, Wikistrat use Ad hoc Workflows for both their consulting services and product offerings. In services, Ad hoc Workflows has featured as the mechanism to trigger dissemination; by leveraging Ad hoc Workflows' tight integration with Comalatech's Remote Publishing Plugin, the plugin intelligently pushes copies of vetted content to remote sites. Here true separation is important - unpublished information simply isn't present on other sites, nullifying all concerns of space permissions or restrictions. Wikistrat's clients enjoy Workflow parameters too - its flexibility allows impromptu groups of staff to be assigned to a project, without necessitating a slew of Confluence groups.

Both Editorial and Peer based

In Wikistrat's subscription based wiki - workflow is deployed in several ways. The Comalatech-supplied Editor-approval publishing cycle was adapted for their editorial content-driven space. Wikistrat also have a peer-editing space, in which contributors can create and edit pages, but where new pages and edits are workflowed to allow for contributions to be moderated. This staging adds advantage that authors can work on a concept undisturbed by other users until such a time they are ready, avoiding intermediate updates and unnecessary page merges.

Organizational Learning

The Ad hoc feature - where each page can have its own, adaptive, workflow instead of a structured workflow applied to all pages in a space - is set to become a key, long-term feature for Wikistrat, enabling their knowledge workers to work freely with each other, culminating in a set of organizational processes by retrospectively summarizing interactions. Daniel says Wikistrat especially values this because many of his clients have projects that are long-running, with up to 3 years until a project team gets the opportunity to retrospective analyze to improve processes.

"Neat and Effective"

Comalatech's Workflow plugin is so far the only commercial plugin that Wikistrat depends on. Daniel is really pleased that “Ad-Hoc Workflows provided a neat and effective solution to a critical problem” especially with the extent of control that's possible in Ad hoc Workflows without resorting to programming. In short, Ad hoc Workflows ushers in a whole new paradigm for inter-governmental and inter-organisational collaboration.

Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA