This past Friday I had the (mostly) pleasure of a face-to-face job interview for a business analyst role that supports intranet evolution for a large international company. This was a wake-up call for me on several levels. One of the (less personal) wake-ups was to be reminded that wiki adoption is still moving cautiously, or is even a point of open debate, in many (the majority of?) corporations. Coming from my recent experience within the software industry, where I’d been using and successfully advocating for wikis for three or more years. this was an opportunity to re-calibrate my early adopter mind-set that risks thinking of wiki as just another “given” collaboration tool, not unlike the assumption of email and instant messaging.
This reminder on wiki adoption status was then further reinforced over the weekend when I read Luis Suarez’s blog post: When Wikis Won’t Work: 10 Questions to Ask Before Full Adoption, which continued from Lucas McDonnell’s: When Wikis won’t work: 5 questions to ask post earlier in the week, which built from Doug Cornelius’s post, prompted by Chris Taylor’s piece in Business 2.0 in February. Whew. Got that thread?
Fine questions from Luis and Lucas; however, what was missing for me is the context and use cases for the potential wiki implementation under evaluation. In these posts, and frequently elsewhere when wiki viability is discussed, I sense at least an implicit assumption that the primary use case is the Wikipedia one — what I summarize as: “community creates consensus-based truth regarding a particular topic.” This is a fine, although a frequently challenging, use case; however, it is not the one that I have often found to be the driver for a successful wiki implementation.
Additionally, the above thread of posts doesn’t always make a clear distinction between public and behind the firewall wikis — a ’scope’ continuum that looks something like:
- A private wiki used by one person for their own personal knowledge management
- A behind the firewall wiki in a company where the wiki (or namespace within the wiki) is only available to some employees, but not other employees due to confidentiality and/or legal or other considerations
- A behind the firewall wiki in a company where the wiki is available to all employees
- A company wiki also open to business partners, but not the public at large
- A public wiki editable only by a few — perhaps even just one person, as in a wiki used as part of a blog infrastructure for static page creation, but which is not open to edits by other than the author
- A public wiki editable by anyone registered
- A public wiki editable by anyone, without registration requirement
Some of the proposed questions are less applicable, or not applicable at all, for some scopes. For example, issues related to “trust” and “collaboration” don’t arise if the wiki is being used as a personal knowledge management tool (even if company hosted.)
Back to wiki use cases — the following are a few possibilities [in my usual (for my blog publishing) descriptive, versus rigorously defined format], which are distinct enough from the “Wikipedia” use case that, again, all the proposed questions do not universally apply:
- Documenting a business process (step by step instructions) — either as an initial draft for what is later to be “locked-down” in a document form (e.g. as required by government regulations), or not
- Sharing tips and personal experiences related to a business process that is documented elsewhere
- Creating a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) to support a software application or business process
- Creating a glossary of terms that are specific to the project or company
- Creating a “portal” to commonly used resources within a team or community, e.g. frequently used URLs to applications, documentation, contact information, etc.
- Creating a bibliography of team/community member’s reading that they found valuable for the project or topic
- Preparing for a face-to-face or virtual event. I have found wikis to be a very useful support for gathering participant input (e.g. proposing and finalizing agenda topics) and defining logistics for the event (e.g. when participants flights land, arranging car-pooling to the venue, selecting dinner locations, etc.)
- Supporting weekly (or other periodic) face-to-face meetings. For example, conference room(s), phone numbers, facilitation assignments, agenda, etc.
- Augmenting live conversation, e.g. taking jointly visible notes during a virtual meeting — either as part of a web conferencing solution, or independently
- Maintaining a “lab or project notebook” to share across shifts (teams working different hours on the same project) and/or physical locations — although, personally, I would first consider using a blog infrastructure for this
- Collaborative writing, in the sense of the Penguin books novel referred to by Chris Taylor. In a business context this could be, for example, text for a user manual.
When a company or group is deciding if wiki technology is worth pursuing, they should consider which of these and other uses cases they might achieve value from and then tailor their evaluation questions appropriately.
Ray, I think these are all excellent ideas on using wikis and I think your point on people seeing Wikipedia as the major use case is well-taken. I rarely use Wikipedia anymore as an example of a wiki because I find that for people who don’t know what a wiki is, there’s often a negative connotation to the idea that usually has little applicability to the people with whom I’m talking. I’ve also been focusing more on how to use wikis to address specific business issues/problems and your use cases above give me some more ideas on how to do that. Thanks for a great post.
Thanks Michele!
Ray
Ray, I agree that the Wikipedia model is not the right model for wikis in an enterprise. Any other wiki, inside or outside the enterprise needs to be focused on a particular. Wikipedia, as a first mover, won the battle for big all-purpose wiki encyclopedia.
I am having some success using a separate wiki for individual projects: managing a client team, managing our KM group’s projects, planning a conference.
They key to the wiki is its ability to store the information and send out the RSS notification of that new or changed information. I find this a better communication process than drafting a document and emailing it to the group. Everyone ends up storing that email in a different place, with a different way of finding it.
Doug
Hi Doug,
Thanks for dropping by and providing further validation and insight…plus for picking up the Business 2.0 piece to begin with.
I agree with you that efficiency improvement is a key component of adoption. I cringe to think about needing to go back to (at least temporarily at a new employer) using a document repository infrastructure for things like a FAQ, which can involve as many as seven process steps:
1. locate document in repository
2. reserve document (check-out)
3. download document to hard-drive
4. edit document
5. upload document to repository
6. unreserve document (check-in)
7. (potentially) manually notify others of the update
Contrast to a wiki approach of “edit in place” and move on…avoiding upload/download time and knowing that email or RSS notification has in the background taken care of Step 7 above.
I found that with a ubiquitous wiki infrastructure, I would contribute to FAQs and the like that I would realistically have never contributed to if editing involved dealing with a document or a heavy-weight web page editing solution of (say) a Vignette or Interwoven.
Ray
Hello Ray,
Fantastic post! I think this post makes a lot of readers understand the potential of wiki better.
I always start my presentation explaining the difference between a ‘public wiki’ and an ‘enterprise wiki’. As you say there is a huge difference between the two. I think it is even better if you divide the list above in public use and enterprise use.
The wikis I implement in organisations are often an instrument to promote a new open and innovative culture. That is why I don’t understand the use of wiki for personal knowledge management. Of course you can use wiki software for this, but the added value of a wiki is that you can improve the quality of information by collaborating with a group of people.
Greetings,
Bas
Nice post Ray,
Just wrote about wikis being the unsung heroes of social media, which is something I have only appreciated lately. If I had listened a little more to our then head of e-communications (hi Kristen) I would have been in the camp of those who see wikis as common-place. I didn’t until recently, and many companies are only starting to see them as a way out of the information overload (ie e-mail) all complain about. Some even opt to introduce them without actually calling them ‘wikis’. Who cares, as long as they become established. Props also to Doug’s salient point about the need to include an RSS feed.
Thanks Bas and Jasbinder!
Bas: regarding why somebody would use wiki for Personal Knowledge Management, one answer is the lightweight user interface, either as WYSIWYG or syntax that is simpler than full HTML, to still get the advantage of a fully hyper-linked environment. Tomboy Notes is an example of this. Although, agreed, for many situations letting others in for contribution makes even more sense. I’ve thought about doing this for my own resource pages that I exposer across the header of my blog…however, I’ve just not gotten around to setting up a wiki on my own domain yet. Wish-list for WordPress is to have a wiki option for Pages.
Jasbinder: I just read your “unsung heros” post and I think you have it exactly correct both in wiki not seeing the attention of other Web 2.0 applications (that get the popular press), and that the name might be a barrier for some. In five years, I wonder if the name wiki fade into history and it will really just about if a particular page is editable or not by a particular user?
Ray
I am having to prepare a report for school on the use of Wiki’s in business, and am having trouble coming up with statistics. Do any of you know of a site that might have statistics about how many businesses use Wikis?