Integration and Culture Important for Wiki Success
Last week, I attended a brown-bag lunch on social media organized by the Association Forum. While we started the discussion talking about blogs and various other social media, the conversation soon gravitated to the pros/cons and dos/don’ts of corporate wikis. And if the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council (APC) study is accurate, it’s no wonder: the study predicts that by 2009, at least 50% of organizations will use wikis as important work collaboration tools.
The APC identified 7 strategies after surveying more than 160 “active corporate wiki users.” I’ll focus on integration and culture.
Integration
I know I’ve already talked about integration in my last two blog posts, but I can’t emphasize this point enough. Just like you wouldn’t hire someone and then seat them in a faraway corner, separated from everyone else, new media has to be fully integrated within the company for it to truly be effective. As the APC report states, the wiki should be integrated as “one of several important tools in an organization’s IT collaboration architecture.”
Culture
One of the APC’s recommendations is to understand that “wikis are best used in work cultures that encourage collaboration. Without an appropriate fit with the workplace culture, wiki technology will be of limited value in sharing knowledge, ideas and practices.”
At Duo, collaboration is one of our core values. To facilitate collaboration, we started an internal wiki two years ago. “At first, I thought only the tech guys would use the wiki, but I’m amazed at how quickly everyone in the company embraced it. Now the project managers use it regularly… and the wiki has become a repository of shared knowledge, great for troubleshooting issues,” said Jason Priestas, a senior developer.
For companies where active collaboration and open sharing of information is not so much a part of the work culture, a fellow participant at the Association Forum brown-bag lunch recommended some ways to make wiki use a habit. For example, instead of simply answering questions over email, people can be incentivized to direct each other to the wiki instead. The APC also suggests assigning a champion to each wiki.
Interestingly, the State Department has its own internal wiki, Diplopedia, a resource that contains biographies of political and business leaders, reading lists and even instructions on how to order lunch. It may surprise some that such a top-down organization is actively using grassroots technology – especially technology that allows anyone to change entries. But according to Noam Cohen, “Diplopedia does not allow anonymous contributors, so bad actors could be tracked down.” Such safeguards have, so far, successfully prevented people from “committing career suicide,” as Mr Johnson from the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy puts it.
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To learn more about wikis and how to implement them effectively, come listen to the wiki master and evangelist, Stewart Mader, give his keynote address at the Web Content Conference 2009 in Tampa Bay, Florida! Mader is the author of Wikipatterns: A Practical Guide to Improving Productivity and Collaboration in Your Organization and founder of Wikipatterns.com.
