This must be my wiki-morning, the second story in a row. I have a backlog of posts to finish and I find myself reacting to news instead. I should follow Stefan’s example, and stay focused .. yet the opportunity is too good to miss.
“At Cobb County school system in Georgia,a spam filter is causing a political dust-up.
Officials say a bid to provide telephone services to the system was gobbled up by the filter, and the bidder was subsequently disqualified, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The term “long distance” was apparently what triggered the block.
The school system had requested an e-mail as a follow-up to the formal bid, which had previously been submitted on paper. When they didn’t see the reply, officials dismissed the bidder and awarded the contract to another–more expensive–contractor. Now the bidder and the school system are arguing over whose fault it was.” (source: Blogma)
Here’s a wonderful showcase that calls for a wiki. Set up separate pages for each participating vendor where they directly upload all relevant documentation. If they make changes, the wiki keeps track of versions and shows what the changes are. School district officials who have a role in the decision-making process have access to all vendor pages, so they can compare the bids, plus they can set up their own internal workpages where the create notes, discussions, tables .. i.e. collaborate easily.
At the end of the process they have one compact site, the wiki that includes the official bids as well as all supporting documentation instead of hundreds of emails, cc’s, untrackable attachments.
(I have posted parts of this article on The SME Blog where I am a guest blogger)
Tags: wiki, collaboration, bidding, bidprocess, versioncontrol, zoliblog
Zoli,
While a wiki may seem like a great solution for such inter-enterprise collaboration as you have suggested, the confidentiality of sealed bidding process makes life a lot more difficult 😉
That’s why we sell an eprocurement product, specifically for the public sector, that not only provides online bidding and sealed bid lifecycle functionality but also built-in capabilities for secure collaboration, document exchange, approval workflows, etc, amongst various inter-enterprise entities…
Unfortunately, Cobb County is using a legacy system from CGI-AMS and their supplier portal product that does not support such document exchange 😉
Sure, there is room for function-specific, process driven enteprise software, but I think you are playing in a different league. A wiki is a low cost, general purpose do-it-yourself approach for ad-hoc projects, it doesn’t compete with functionally rich packages, but may be perfect when you only have a few bids a year…