Wiki goodness
Man, I loves me some wiki. This evening I ran across a post on Lifehacker about using wikis for business. They point to this article at Information Week on the same topic. If you’re already down with wikis, there won’t be much new info in the article for you. But there is a nice chart on the second page that helps determine whether a wiki will work in your organization.
This is top-of-mind for me right now since I just established yet another office wiki at the new job. I’ve established them in the last three organizations that I’ve worked in, and they’ve always been beneficial. Getting folks on the wiki train can be a bit of a tough sell. Wiki markup is pretty easy to figure out, but definitely seems a bit arcane to the uninitiated. Especially those who don’t have a whole lot of web experience beyond, you know, MyYahoo! or something.
In my experience, nothing is more important for the success of a wiki than a champion and a quorum. You’ve got to have at least one influential person who is willing to pitch the wiki at every turn, and you’ve got to have a sufficient number of folks in the office on board with the wiki. The more little things get pushed over to the wiki, the more it’ll be used. Soon it’ll be the defacto first stop for slapping together new policy, lists of "reports needed" and quick knowledge sharing between colleagues.
One of the biggest problems I’ve had with wikis is the tendency for temporary information to stick around too long. An easy solution is for someone to "own" each page–that way that person can lock, archive or delete the page when it’s no longer of use. It’s kind of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem. When everyone is responsible for keeping the place clean, often nobody will do the work since they’ll rely on everyone else. It’s a real problem and, aside from just keeping good wiki hygiene in front of everyone, it’s tough to overcome.
Anyway, the article is right on. There’s definitely a place for wikis in business.
Related Stories
POSTED IN: web/tech
9 opinions for Wiki goodness
Des Paroz
Aug 10, 2005 at 12:46 am
Bren, you hit on an important point. I believe that in every project, every system, there needs to be a single point of ownership. If more than one person owns something, there is a global tendency to think that someone else will fix a problem.
Not only should someone own a wiki (or wiki page) from the perspective of managing the lifecycle, but because of the nature of a wiki, that same person should own the content, making sure that the information is correct, and not hijacked in any way.
Trends and Issues in Extension
Aug 10, 2005 at 2:06 am
More Wiki Follow-up - More Ways to Use Them in Organizations
Slacker Manager has some thoughts on the InformationWeek article on wikis that I discussed below. More ideas on how they might be used in organizations, along with some advice on keeping them updated by assigning ownership. More good information.
NIF
Aug 10, 2005 at 11:37 am
The Opposite of Sleeping In
Today’s dose of NIF - News, Interesting & Funny … halfway there!
Brandon
Aug 11, 2005 at 4:58 am
We are in the process of trying to set up development and documentation wikis where I work now. The whole project has been spearheaded by me but is unfortunately dying rapidly due to a lack of commitment from management and employees.
At least I tried.
regina
Aug 11, 2005 at 5:14 am
Thanks for the post. Good info on links and wikis. I think wikis are great, even though I haven’t used them yet. I am thinking about how they can be used as tools to capture ideas, thoughts and feedback during the strategic planning process especially to capture insights and ideas from customer facing employees that can be turned into tactics and initiatives, etc.
I also think there are applications from a career development perspective for employees to have something like a resume/bio wiki - which becomes the internal marketplace for talent, etc. I didn’t realize about the access controls piece and therefore wonder if in someway wikis can be used for performance reviews/360 fb/talent audits, etc for HIPOs. (I didn’t jump on the STOP performance appraisal bandwagon from a few weeks ago. I think and believe they are necessary!) Any thoughts?
Genuine Curiosity
Aug 11, 2005 at 9:50 am
http://blog.dwayne.melancon.net/blog/_archives/2005/8/11/1129245.html
Just read Bren’s post on wikis and, as usual, it fit in well with discussions I’ve been having with customers recently (Bren and I tend to hear similar siren so…
Greg
Aug 16, 2005 at 11:31 pm
I love our corporate Wiki. We’ve had it up for less than a year, but had all the right factors fall in place at once:
1) 2 VPs (product management and development/QA) got behind it in a big way
2) There was a consensus that we all hated tracking Word documents passed around in Outlook or checked in to a version control system
3) Our developers (myself included) prefer plain text to rich text any day, and thus are disinclined to write documentation in Word or anything else for internal ideas, tools, designs, requirements, or anything that isn’t code.
So we went with Confluence from http://www.atlassian.com, a commercial product based on open-source components. We needed the security options, primarily, so some areas are only accessible to certain departments. We wouldn’t want sales selling features we’re only discussing as possibilities, for example. That happend years ago, and led to the firing of an unnamed salesman.
It is now the primary (often only) repository of product planning information, internal process and tool documentation, application data research archives, and more.
I can find stuff there by link traversal or simple searching, which I couldn’t do before (until Google Desktop Search came out, with hacks to index network drives).
We’ve found it allows for a compromize everyone can work with for open discussion vs. the paralasis of large group decision-making. managers discuss product strategy, and their minutes go in the Wiki, where developers and others can read them and comment on them if they want. Stakeholders self-select, unnecessary meetings are avoided, everyone feels they are “in the know”, and life is good.
About transient data - that’s where an issue tracking system is great. Most are geared toward software development, but better ones are more generic and can support any sort of problem/solution workflow.
There are some systems that combine issue tracking with Wiki, which I think is the next logical evolutionary step.
Atlasian (mentioned above) is integrating their issue tracker (Jira) with Confluence. My company uses both.
Free and simpler is Trac (http://www.edgewall.com/trac/), which combines issue tracking, Wiki, and source control (via Subversion, the replacement for CVS, for those that care).
I’ve seen Trac in the “wild”, used by several open-source projects I use at home (but that http://mythtv.org project is another story entirely).
Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching
Sep 4, 2005 at 12:28 pm
Start a List: “What I Want to Learn”
Remember, wanting is a good thing. It’s been a very stimulating weekend so far. I’m getting a lot of help from all of you in ignoring my new “empty nest syndrome” — I don’t have the time to succumb to
Bill Seitz
Sep 15, 2005 at 12:42 pm
I find a good way to deal with the aging of info is to just remember to type a date into a section.
That way, if you’re reading a page, and you notice an old date on that section, you ask yourself whether it might have become inaccurate…
If it’s no longer accurate, you might want to keep it around anyway, but label it clearly for archival purposes… (sometimes you want to re-discover an old idea that might make more sense now than it did before…)