The bMighty Blog -- Internet/Web

The business value of wikis are becoming more and more obvious: They foster collaboration, encourage creativity, and they are relatively easy and inexpensive to create. But if you want widespread adoption of your company's wiki there are a few simple tips you should consider.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, which is on its last day in Boston, the session entitled "Making Wikis Ridiculously Successful: Real Lessons, Real Tips" was ridiculously crowded. The interest businesses have in creating good wikis was obvious and one of the presenters, Jeffrey Walker, the president of Atlassian described wikis as an "unstoppable force."

He had a number of examples of large enterprise wikis -- companies like SAP, Deutsche Bahn, and Vodaphone -- but noted that smaller companies with wikis have a higher adoption rate among their employees. (He emphasized that small and midsized companies should consider open source technology for their wikis.)

Companies are using wikis for training purposes, for knowledge management, and, interestingly enough, to connect. Many of the wikis Walker presented included internal company blogs.

But making a good wiki is the key to its success. Linda Skrocki, a senior engineering program manager at Sun Microsystems, the second presenter in this session had something to say about that.

She led the charge within Sun to develop its wiki and she had some solid tips for ensuring the success of a company's wiki:

• Relax and trust your contributors. Skrocki emphasized that a company needs to balance a policy of trust with risk. Sun employees can post blogs on the wiki and they are asked to read company guidelines which are essentially maintain a conversational tone, keep it short, and make it easy to read through. Skrocki noted that "obviously employees shouldn't blog about proprietary information" – it's not always obvious to everyone! – but she said the company had about five issues in over 100,000 posts. "It's a self-policing community," she added.
• Seed the site for success. If a company has a new wiki or a new blog site for that matter, "champions" in the company should be enlisted to contribute. Also Skrocki recommended seeding the wiki with content to set the tone.
• Guide and nurture a self sufficient community. Enable users, said Skrocki, to self train, police, support, evangelize, and organize themselves. Have them create forums.

One last note: Many members of the audience pressed the presenters – should they blog, do wikis, or do both?

Walker pointed out that while some wikis include a blogging capability and many companies might want to do both, the differences are there. Blogging works for things that have a "shelf life" and is great for discourse. A wiki page allows for editing and commenting and works well for organic collaboration in daily project work. It works, he said, for the creation of knowledge a company wants to keep permanent and organized.

But he added, "A company needs to set the tone and context for what the intended use of the site is."

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