Evolution of Wiki Usage and Adoption

Informationweek has a nice article by Ezra Goodnoe from Feb 3 about wiki usage and adoption as demonstrated by some case studies from Nokia, Angel.com, and the Canadian Meteorological Society. Marc Laporte, who runs a Quebec-based consulting business that builds, installs, and maintains open-source wikis provides some additional observations. 

Almost everything cited in this article I’ve experienced first-hand and have commented upon in previous posts. It’s a great overview for getting a sense of the typical evolution of wiki adoption in three very different companies.

A couple good introductory statements from the article for the uninitiated… 

A wiki is a Web site that can be edited by anybody who is granted permission. In a business environment, that can mean a workgroup, a department, or even the whole company. The people who access the data and documents in a wiki are also the authors of the wiki, making it ideal for information sharing. 

…wikis can link to spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, PDFs – anything that can be displayed in a browser. They can also embed standard communications media such as e-mail and IM. In other words, they let users gather all the information and correspondence pertinent to a project within one central location.

I underlined "granted permission" as a reminder that this is about private websites. I underlined that last phrase to emphasize the importance of ‘context’. Context is the single most important attribute of process, group work, and projects when collecting, analyzing, sharing, and acting on information. It is missing from most technologies and corporate organizations. 

BTW, Wikipedia was mentioned only once in the article and NOT as the typical examle of a wiki. One of the people quoted in the article was credited with having made some editorial contributions to Wikipedia. Woo-hoo, somebody in the MSM actually gets it (yes, I refer to the mainstream 'tech' media as part of the MSM). Way to go, Ezra and Informationweek!

In any event, some random quotes from the article, all of which are excellent advice and insight about how wikis get a foothold in the organization and grow naturally .… 

• ...within three months of the initial wiki deployment, eight wikis had sprung up 
• The wiki was at first relegated to a test bed, but quickly proved both stable and popular enough to graduate to legitimate status 
• ...the first wiki was brought in as an experiment by the Corporate Strategy team without consulting the IT department…After installing it we were told that it was probably against company policy. 
• The wiki was at first relegated to a test bed, but quickly proved both stable and popular enough to graduate to legitimate status 
• choose a wiki carefully. Switching between them is not easy: The nomenclature is sometimes proprietary and will almost certainly change if you change wikis 
• ...wikis don't suffer the same adoption problems as other technologies, because they quickly prove themselves to be both intuitive and viral 
• ...people were initially thrown by the idea of a wiki, but once they overcame that, the usefulness of the tool became evident 
• ...wikis are still early in their evolution as corporate tools and often have a nonprofessional look and feel. 
• Wikis are most successful when they are allowed to grow from a grass-roots effort. 
• Those who don't participate are left out of the conversation and stand the risk of not being as informed as their peers 
• Although wikis grow organically as users add to them, wiki managers can help organize them into an easily understandable structure right at the outset 
• ...wikis should be central to a larger effort to revolutionize an office – they should be an expression of a change in ideas as well as an attempt to change rigid behaviors 
• When used intelligently and trustingly, wikis can be a highly effective means of facilitating information distribution 

I have just a couple summary points to offer:

• If effectively nurtured at the grassroots level, wikis do grow virally.
• Wikis do improve communication, process and results.
• Wikis draw in people who fundamentally want to do the right thing by the team and the company.
• Adoption is less about learning new technology and more about changing habits.

Comments

[mark]

wikis rocks, expert-led wikis rock even more so!