Sims Learning Connections

Catching-up with these two leading-edge examples of “enterprise 2.0 intranets.”

Atlassian

Confluence wiki developer Atlassian’s CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes shared his view on enterprise wikis, including a glimpse of their own, in this nicely produced slide set:

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My notes and comments:

• Slides 14-17 distances from Wikipedia as the stereotypical wiki — this echoes my own wiki wake-up call last month.
• Slide 20 from FAST-sponsored survey gives a strange view of enterprise wiki adoption going down, not up. I’m not sure what to make of this, and seeing the data presented live on YouTube doesn’t enlighten either.
• Includes adoption examples from Citigroup and Pixar
• Slide 35-48, like the next slide set from Avenue A | Razorfish, mixes the pure wiki with other functionality (e.g. blogs) that happen to be deployed within the same platform as the wiki functionality. This overloading of ‘wiki’ risks making the term no longer useful as descriptor of an editable web page, but rather confused as a general descriptor for an “enterprise 2.0 intranet” overall. Falling into this trap myself, I originally I had this post titled “Enterprise Wikis -… ;” however, I edited before publish when I realized I would be adding fuel to this potential confusion.
• The “too much structure” anti-pattern, slide 59, also previews the Avenue A | Razorfish slide set and their exploration of a stronger ‘wiki information architecture’ (which I believe is not necessarily the oxymoron that it first reads as) in their next evolution.
• Good closing recipe on slide 64

Avenue A | Razorfish

Last month Avenue A | Razorfish shared this equally polished slide set that describes their own wiki enterprise 2.0 intranet adoption:

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Commentary:

• Last November Andrew McAfee extensively described the original release of this “enterprise 2.0 intranet.” Also see McAfee’s follow-on post that describes some security/confidential concerns with the del.icio.us feed, and read the comments on both posts for balance.
• In February, Jeffrey Walker, Atlassian’s president, asks if Mediawiki (Avenue A | Razorfish’s choice of platforms) is an Enterprise Wiki? Again, read the comments for the fuller picture. An additional datapoint here is my former employer, Novell, who also used Mediawiki as an effective enterprise platform; again after sufficient customizations to enable single-sign-on and intranet skinning. Aside from budget aspects of coming up with purchase dollars, versus intern labor; as a very earlier adopter, there just weren’t options such as Confluence to even consider. Now the platform technology decision is becoming more complex yet, as the traditional big vendors scrap for enterprise 2.0 supremacy.
• Where I believe this will all end up is with the deep integration of wiki functionality — not unlike the progression of widgets/portlets. In the future the decision for intranets will not be so much if to use wiki functionality, but rather exactly where and how it best makes sense to. For companies in the relatively unregulated software industry (as in these two examples) this may be a fairly wide adoption of wiki as the intranet platform; whereas, for in more regulated industries such as financial services or pharma, this will be a more limited (but non-zero) adoption that is deeply integrated within the more traditional top-down intranet. Contrast this to current adoption experimentation that often is with a stand-alone wiki that then risks further fracturing the knowledgebase. As discussed in the comments of my wiki wake-up call, I also then believe the word wiki fades away…especially as a word exposed to employees at large…again, just as why would the average employee know or care about the word widget?