Do You Need a Wiki?

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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Topic: Making Wikis Work

Reference: Greenfield, Dave. “Wikis@Work”. eWeek. November 26, 2007, pp. 44-51.

The shared information model, Web 2.0, social networking, is all the rage today. AOL recently purchased the social networking site Bebo to help revive its business model because of the power of social aggregation and the leverage of advertising revenue. From an enterprise standpoint, organizations are starting to look at Wikis as a portal into community product support, information sharing, and relevant feedback to news, products, and events. Wikis are like a hyper Lotus Notes application that can be more useful for information sharing on team projects, knowledge transfer, and project planning. However, the consolidation of information and knowledge transfer can also increase the risk of intellectual property theft and the misappropriation of trade secrets. The commentator of the referenced article focuses on this discussion and clearly indicates that a delicate balance must be struck. “IT and business managers will have to strike a careful balance of control and freedom to make wiki deployments a success.” One of the big benefits of wikis are the ability to add mashed up information, RSS feeds, and other data to the space in support of the wiki. These elements are highly attractive and serve as motivation for community building. You need a critical mass in order to make a wiki workable. “The ‘network effect’ sets in when user participation becomes organic-where enough individuals are involved with the wiki (or any social medium, for that matter) that other users want to contribute and be involved with the project”. Some of the critical elements include keeping the site simple, appropriate sign-on, allowing plain text typing (WYSIWYG editing), building the site into the information flow, and adding features like version control. Some of the critical software suppliers include “Jive Software’s Clearspace, BEA Systems’Aqualogic, and Microsoft’s SharePoint.” I have experience with Sharepoint and it is a flexible application with good community building potential. The wiki concept is a good one, but from a management perspective its use is only better than other applications if people use it and it saves time, money, and resources. It seems to me that the culture of your organization may be the biggest variable in getting wikis embraced by your organization. Wikis may not fly in certain organizations because of information hoarding, confidentiality, or risk management. Organizations, whether public or private, will have to make a cultural assessment to determine how well wikis fit in their enterprise environment. I strongly suggest piloting the concept before a full scale enterprise application is adopted. Let me know your thoughts on this subject as well.

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3.23 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."