Wiki’s drive 99% of the population crazy.  Yet if you want to know or understand about something, Wikipedia is addictive.  Whether you want to know the definition of chaos, the difference between Shia and Sunni, or what is an Apricot, Wikipedia has it.

Yet, the whole concept seems to be working. Wikis have popped up all over the Web, almost overnight and without any established process or central guidance in place. Maybe, people are more disciplined than we give them credit for. Maybe, it’s what people can collectively do as a Web-based community that should make us take notice.

As a CIO, you may want to reconsider how you collect data and knowledge from outside your organization and store it in an information system. Several new technologies are on the way that can help you deal with an explosion of information.

Source: IT Business

In this article, Martin argues that wiki’s should be used by the CIO to gather information external to the organisation about new technologies that are relevant to the organisation.  I would argue its a great way to gather internal information too.  We know that the information in wiki’s are maintained by 1% of the participants, and that it perfectly ok.  It means the experts are keeping the medium up to date, and monitoring it, while the masses take advantage of the dynamic and simple to follow information.

Back to the chaos theory entry in Wikipedia.  In plain English (I think) this says that even in the midst of apparent chaos, there are patterns, but those patterns will not appear until you accept chaos, and allow the pattern to form naturally.

The cases of most interest arise when the chaotic behavior takes place on an attractor, since then a large set of initial conditions will lead to orbits that converge to this chaotic region.

This is no small feat to accept for a firm that is driven by the apparent chaos of customer preferences, channel explosions, business risks, and security threats.  So now you want to permit chaos in the information space!  The answer to that point is that information is in a state of chaos already, and is largely unmanageable in most companys.  How much intellectual capital sits unused on laptop hard drives or network drives.  how many times do we hear questions such as:

• what is the strategy for …. ?
• What are the next steps for …  ?
• How do we know where to start for  …. ?

Intranets can solve for some of these things, but oftentimes intranets are the source of the problem, due to their explosion and lack of any topology or information architecture that any one person comprehends.

What is required is something that makes the answer to those questions readily available, so that we can concentrate on the solution, and not be diverted by sourcing the question.

The final comment in the piece sums it up.  Its not a simple thing to accept, but the advantages are there to at least consider.

I think CIOs who begin to embrace chaos theory, and look at ways it might apply to their organization, will have an enormous advantage over the competition. They could also have a lot of fun.