When electrical equipment manufacturer Osborne Transformer was looking to update its Web site, the management team had the good fortune of having a third-generation family member on the staff who understood the potential of 21st century tools to solve some of the problems at a 21st century business.

Jeff Osborne got his first taste of 2.0 tools while working as a management consultant at SAP's Palo Alto development labs, working on a blog platform implementation. Even after he returned to help the family business with the Web update, he kept this technology in the back of his mind, and sold his father on its specific application to the problem at hand.

"We were saying 'How are we going to develop our Web site?' and we thought that a wiki would work," remembers Osborne. "And it did. I used the same graphic designers, same database guys, the same experts and me."

The project was a success, and allowed the Osbornes to plan and execute a complete Web refresh with a minimum of fuss.

However, this early success led Jeff and his father, president and chief engineer Jim Osborne, to at least consider using this custom-branded wiki workspace for other purposes. "It wasn't that we had an urgent master plan, or an urgent need to cut down on intracompany e-mails -- we just saw the wiki workspace as a tool with potential to encourage the kind of collaboration we felt we needed."

Thus, a second wave of wiki applications was born, created by both management and staff on an ad-hoc basis as needs arose. Not only did this process coincide with a need for knowledge capture, but it empowered the Osborne Transformer workforce in a way that dovetailed nicely into an overall refresh of the company hierarchy itself.

"Osborne is transforming to a distributed leadership model, and we wanted the ability for good ideas to come from all levels of the organization," Jeff Osborne observes. Similarly, he says that at Osborne, as at most if not all companies, there's no time to waste duplicating effort. "We wanted everyone to know what the rest of the team is doing, and to help improve the decision-making process."

For example, Osborne's sales team now uses a wiki workspace to collate and track customer quotes. Standards-setting and process documentation have also been streamlined through the Socialtext wiki appliance. "When we hired a new customer service manager, we were able to provide him with the information he needs to get up to speed quickly," says Osborne.

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