Here’s some interesting news from IBM that caught my eye — new enterprise mashup technology, QEDWiki from IBM labs. To quote from the press release, it seems that wikis can front-end business process redesign initiatives.

QEDWiki, which is based on Web 2.0 technologies, is applicable for business situations. IBM’s Enterprise Mashup Technology breaks down the barriers of traditional application development and provides a framework that uses information from the Web and wiki technology to allow people to create a customized application in less than five minutes. For instance, many businesses rely on weather conditions when planning daily operations. QEDWiki can help a logistics manager plan the most efficient way to send rock salt, shovels and snow blowers to the Northeast to stock the store in time for a forecasted record snow storm. By using the enterprise mashup maker, the manager can “drag and drop” weather reports, online maps and the company’s national hardware inventory data into an application that will show which stores will be effected by the storm and which stores need inventory. The technology can quickly enable a store manager to prioritize product deliveries to meet customer demand within a small timeframe.

Per chance, wikis provide a more intuitive presentation of information than simple lists. This is going to be an important development for collaborative technologies. Moreover, mashups when linked to wikis can facilitate rapid application development–quickly putting up an ad hoc information sharing environment and then tweaking it, on-the-fly.

But all this begins by having access to well-tagged, self-describing content. The hard part is designing the underlying information architecture, developing the relevant content schemas, and tagging all of the content and their varied contexts in the first place.