Lessons learned from enterprise wikis

Razorfish has developed their own enterprise wiki that combines things from a corporate blog, mailing lists, and other collaborative technologies. The wiki is useful for spreading their knowledge across their wide network, and keeping people up-to-date on best practices, or even, previous work that they have done for their clients.

For example, Ray mentioned a weather feed that one client wanted to incorporate into their Web site. Using the wiki, a staffer was able to track down three previous feed projects that had been developed in the past and present their client with this work in a matter of a few minutes. Without the wiki, it would have taken numerous phone calls and emails to track this information down within the corporation, or the staffer might have had to build it from scratch without the benefit of this knowledge.

You can get a taste for what they have developed by reading their case study published last year by Andrew McAfee, an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School

Based on my conversation with Ray, here are some of the lessons that they have learned with living with this project.

What I found most interesting about the company was its own Intranet. To hear David, Ray, and Amy tell it, the company's traditional static Intranet -- the place where an employee would go to look up benefits information or peruse the latest press releases -- still exists, but has been marginalized by a suite of Enterprise 2.0 tools. Ray fired up his laptop and showed me the company's de facto homepage:

Let's look at this page one section at a time. The leftmost area of the screen, which is consistent across all of AARF's E2.0 Intranet pages, is devoted to navigation. Underneath the search box are two sets of pointers to other pages. The contents of the top box are imposed, the bottom emergent. The top box has links to many of the usual suspects: individuals' pages, projects, and company information. Underneath this is a tag cloud. Employees can tag documents they upload and pages on the Intranet and Internet with helpful words and phrases. The most popular of these tags show up in the box in alphabetical order, with font size indicating relative popularity.

The middle column consists of two boxes. The top one is devoted to Internet content, the bottom one to AARF Intranet content. What Internet content shows up? AARF has built interfaces to the bookmarking site del.icio.us, the photo sharing site Flickr, and Digg, a site where members vote on the importance of news stories. All three use tags, or something close.

AARF employees have learned to add the tag 'AARF' when they come across a web page (using del.icio.us), a photo (Flickr), or a news story (Digg) that they think will be of interest to their colleagues. Shortly after they add this tag, the bookmark (look at the top of the box), thumbnail of the photo (middle) or headline and description of the story (bottom) show up within the AARF E2.0 Intranet. So AARF has found a fast and low-overhead way to let its employees share Internet content with each other. It's also free; these interfaces with del.icio.us, Flickr, and Digg require no fees and no permissions. I find this simply brilliant.

The bottom box in the middle of the page shows most recent documents uploaded to and pages created on the company's Intranet. Since the E2.0 Intranet is essentially a wiki, anyone can create a new page. AARF uses the free, open source MediaWiki wiki software. This software is not WYSIWYG, so users need to be comfortable with the MediaWiki markup language.

The rightmost section of the page shows the most recent blog posts. At AARF, these include emails to group mailing lists, which are automatically posted to a bloglike page.

David had the only grey hair in the group, so I asked him if it was difficult for the more senior people at AARF to understand the E2.0 Intranet and contribute effectively to it. His answer was intriguing. He said that he had a nephew at college, and the only way he would consent to communicate with David was via Facebook -- no email, no IM. Becuase of this, AARF's Intranet was not unfamiliar territory. His anecdote provided more evidence that newbies think very differently about IT and collaboration, as I wrote earlier. It also showed me that we oldsters can learn the new modes of collaboration if the incentives are in place.

It seems that when companies make these technologies widely available behind the firewall, the only two groups that quickly start using them are techies and newbies.

'Newbies' here means new entrants to the workforce; as I wrote earlier, recent graduates find it natural to socialize, collaborate, and find what they're looking for via technology platforms (think of MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, LastFM, del.icio.us, etc.). In addition to point, click, drag, and drop, their baseline computer skills include search, link, tag, and post.

'Techies' are IT staffers, and also those people scattered throughout the rest of the company who are the natural early adopters and advanced users of whatever technologies are available.

The main reason not to is the fact a huge amount of a company's accumulated knowledge and expertise resides nowhere else except in the heads of the empty quarter's inhabitants. And as I and others have argued previously, Enterprise 2.0 technologies are great tools for making this knowledge and expertise more accessible throughout the organization. They do so in two ways. First, they serve as persistent and universally visible (behind the firewall, anyway) repositories of whatever information people have taken the time to enter. Tagging and linking make this information provide structure to this information, making it easier to search and helping the cream rise to the top.

Imagine a company where a lot of people have internal blogs, and where a lot of collaborative work happens via wikis, group spreadsheets, etc. And imagine Google-level search capability on the company's Intranet. How hard would it be for an employee, even one who had just walked in the door, to quickly find just the right person to bounce an idea off, help with a problem, tell whether a prospective vendor is reliable, or recall what happened the last time a similar project was launched?

The great majority of companies today are far from this scenario because their empty quarters are so large. Are there effective ways to evangelize within it and convert people to Enterprise 2.0 tool use? One strategy is to keep working on the tools themselves, making them more obvious and easy to use. This is certainly a good idea, but I don't have a lot of confidence that it'll bear a lot of fruit in the empty quarter. Old habits die hard, and the 9X problem of email is particularly acute among non-techies.

lightweight Enterprise 2.0 policies might include:

• Maintain a blog for your group / department. Identify who's in charge of it, and update it at least once a week.
• Maintain a blog for each project your lab is working on. Post whatever non-confidential information you'd like your colleagues to know about each one.
• Keep your personal page up to date. Make sure it lists your areas and industries of expertise.
• Use the wiki to make sure your portion of the org chart is up to date.