Wiki That!

Survey about managing wikis in business

Penny Edwards is working on a study regarding managing wikis in business as part of her MBA Technology Management research with the Open University, UK.  She has published a survey about wiki management on her wiki, focusing on people who use or manage wikis in the business environment.

The survey takes approximately 10 minutes to complete.  If you would like to help out, follow the link and fill in the survey.  Your participation would be much appreciated.

Wikis Still Have a Perception Problem

In a recent piece from BtoB Online, author Richard Karpinski examines the impact various media are having on the enterprise. A few quotes from the article...

"Video is really mature from an audience perspective, especially webcasts," said Stacy Malone, VP-interactive media director at Universal McCann. "Beyond that, there's a huge opportunity in video content hosted on b-to-b content sites. But it's been a challenge to get publishers to move in that direction. It's a huge opportunity for publishers to embrace."

Less clear in their impact are wikis (interactive Web pages where users can contribute as well as consume content) and social networks (sites that enable networking and communications among groups of users).

Predictable, I suppose, but I have a theory about the wiki adoption (one I’ve stated many times before). The audience is not perceiving wikis as a ‘collaborative’ medium. Just like the perception that has been ingrained by wikipedia, people view it as a place to get information. Some percentage of the population (2% is my estimate) has a need to ‘vocalize’, therefore they tend to be the content (or information) providers.

Wikis can be more than information repositories. They can be the actual place where groups of people collaborate, communicate, and actually accomplish whatever teams of people need to do. This is a far more productive approach to working in groups than relying on email.

Until companies start promoting and using wikis in that manner, it will remain a fringe technology and companies will miss out on the best productivity tool since email (ironically)..

New Focus For Wiki That!

Dave Pollard (“How To Save The World”) observes the lagging adoption of social networking tools and he is wondering why. He notes that…

One of the purposes of the new flood of social networking tools is to try to organize, facilitate and improve the effectiveness of conversations and collaborative activities. The power and promise of these tools was and is considerable, and a year ago Steve Barth even predicted the demise of group e-mails (in favour of next-gen wikis and other more dynamic tools). But most of these tools remain underused or hardly used at all….

Amen - on both counts. For all the hype in the blogosphere, I have seen very few examples of social networking tools actually being used in the enterprise, nonprofit, or civic arena.

Pollard identifies three categories of the population by the percentages each has adopted certain types of tools – the majority use phone, email, and face-to-face meetings; 20% of the population uses Skype, discussion forums, and weblogs; and a mere 2% use collaborative Web 2.0 tools like wikis. 20% seems high for that middle group and I am fairly certain the majority of that 2% in the last group are still from the technical developer ranks.

David Wilcox (“Designing For Civil Society”) agrees with Pollard’s observations and has seen the same thing in the world of civic involvement.….

It's reassuring, if depressing, to find global networker and commentator Dave Pollard reflecting my own more limited experience of the extent to which people use online tools. He identifies a 80/20 professional digital divide…. My general experience is that maybe one in ten people in nonprofits and public organisations that I meet go beyond basic email and web.…

Amen again (and 1 in 10 is way too high). Wilcox also makes this very insightful observation …

So many commentators on social networking concentrate on the 2 per cent of enthusiasts, throw in more tools and exhortation, and I think can just end up making people feel yet more depressed and disempowered.

In other words, if you ain’t in the choir, the preacher ain’t talkin’ to you.

Pollard and Wilcox have pointed out how Web 2.0 is missing the mark and this cuts to the chase of where I want to go with this blog going forward. I want to have a more dedicated focus on nonprofits. I’ve added nonprofit-focused organizations, blogs, support sites, and volunteer opportunities to my blogrolls and I’ve gotten rid of the esoteric navel-gazing blogs that pretty much have no impact on anybody’s life (A-listers or not).

Web 2.0 bloggers are obsessed with ‘the next big thing’ in mash-ups, social sites, open source gizmos, or public wikis. As soon as a topic gets some traction, everyone in this very small but vocal community is talking about it ad nauseum. While there are some anecdotal examples of effective real world uses for Web 2.0 tools, most of it remains a mystery to the real people in civic or work groups who could actually use and benefit from it.   

All these technologies and heavy traffic sites appear to be ‘ends’ in and of themselves as opposed to a ‘means’ to an end – which is what small groups of people working to a defined goal really need. Personally I think we need a lot less ‘talk’ about Web 2.0 technologies and start demonstrating some actual ‘walk’ with examples of where it is (or should be) working.

So why am I focusing on wikis and nonprofits? Not that I’ll stop writing about Enterprise opportunities since all mission based groups have the same attributes and challenges, but the Enterprise arena has some special obstacles that I have just grown tired of banging my head on.

The problem with the Enterprise arena (aside from the usual cultural issues) is that many of the changes an organization could employ are good but implementing them requires a literal pit stop. Since the daily business of business doesn’t allow for pit stops, one is constantly trying to change the tires in the middle of the race. It just doesn’t happen without a pit stop and a crew that knows what it is doing. When a pit stop IS approved, the pit crew doesn’t seem to know a tire wrench from a pineapple.

The nonprofit arena on the other hand has some special opportunities that would be incredibly satisfying to have a hand in realizing and the cultural obstacles are not quite so frustrating as they are in the Enterprise. Doing things effectively in the Enterprise world is hardly ever appreciated and, as I mentioned in a post some time ago, cheap solutions are not taken seriously in the Enterprise world. At least in the nonprofit world, doing something effectively AND cheaply is seen as a virtue.

Real work in the nonprofit world, like the Enterprise world, is small groups collaborating for the purpose of actually achieving some defined objective. We are constantly involved in multiple dynamic groups and concurrent projects. Whether you are an Enterprise worker or a nonprofit volunteer, you are typically working in 10-20 groups or projects of varying size, scope, and members at any given time. 

It never changes. What also never changes is the convoluted way these groups operate and the missed opportunities of the Web 2.0 wave (which is the essence of the Pollack and Wilcox posts). 

Wikis hold a huge potential for nonprofits to radically improve their service delivery model - far more than any other Web 2.0 tool. I want to see that light go on for as many nonprofits as I can motivate.

But, nonprofits also have a problem (again, aside from the culture and resistance to change) - It’s the lack of any incentive for using it. What would motivate nonprofit supporters and participants to use a collaborative social networking tool instead of email?

What if, in the course of using this new and effective way to collaborate for services delivered, there was a financial payoff for the nonprofit, as well? Isn’t there a way for nonprofits to realize significant revenue like the current online ad channels do?

There is a way to do this. I have a model in mind that can generate lots of ad revenue for nonprofits as a passive revenue stream (the more they use it, the more they make) but that is something I’ll be pursuing through other avenues.

Software and Wiki Sites Have the Same UI Issues

Dan Russell writing at Creating Passionate Users has some thoughts about designing effective user interfaces (UI). Now the target audience for the post is software designers, but I think the message applies very well to those people who set up a wiki for a group to accomplish something.

Anyone who sets up a wiki for a group to do something is, in effect, creating a user interface. The group will form an impression based on their first view of the wiki which can have a crucial 'make or break' effect on the usefulness of that wiki in facilitating the group's purpose.

We all have a tendency to create things (documents, spreadsheets, wikis, plans, powerpoints, etc) based on our own instincts and sense of intuition and, more often than not, we are disappointed when the group doesn't go bonkers with joy over what we did.

You might feel intuition is the best way to understand the problem of designing an interface.  You rely on your intuition, you trust it, maybe you even feel that it’s the source of deep insight and creativity.

But you’d be wrong.

The problem is that our disappointment is misplaced. We are typically disappointed in the group for not seeing the beauty of our creative thinking when, in fact, the fault lies with ourselves for not understanding the group's intuitive nature.

My Sentiments, Exactly

Euan Semple writes "The Obvious?" and had this recent post:

As I get to see more and more organisations I sometimes get overwhelmed by a feeling I can only describe as melancholy at the number of clever, well meaning people in business who spend their working lives making it harder to get things done

As one who spends most of his time actually deep inside the bowels of companies assisting them with whatever obstacles and objectives they are trying to deal with, I can only agree. I don't think people actually TRY to make things more difficult, but there is a tendency for people to develop their own individual approaches to everything using the limited tools at their disposal and, rather than working towards more and more streamlined approaches to working as a group, they end up distancing themselves from each other and the organization as a whole.

It is a constant in every company I have ever seen.

And for what it is worth, I suspect that tendency will continue as Web 2.0 products start seeping into organizations. The mass of individuals will randomly adopt those tools that they find enhance their individual experience, but the net effect on the collective group will continue down the path of inefficiency, confusion, and frustration.

Grow a spine and just do it

The biggest obstacle for wikis is still adoption and the two biggest components of that are email (which makes it easy NOT to do wikis) and basic human nature (a reluctance to change, take the steps, mandate it, and make it successful).

You are a manager, supervisor, or other kind of leader of a group or function that collaboratively works on numerous tasks and requirements. Failure to deliver is ultimately your responsibility. You and your people get it done, but you live on email, attachments, things falling through the cracks, and the occasional irate customer. It's not seamless, it's not productive, and it's not fun.

You've heard all the claims about ease of use and the benefits of adopting wikis, but it isn’t going to happen in your company, is it? Here is a simple step-by-step process for making your life easier, your people happier, and your efforts more productive (Warning – this has an edgy, ‘no-nonsense' tone to it).

• Select a wiki product. If you are just starting out and you fear the likely outcome of 'requesting' your company to provide a wiki solution, then you have 3 choices each of which assumes you are going to just do it and beg forgiveness later (when you will be proving how beneficial it is to the organization!):

1. Have someone in IT that you know is already using a wiki solution internally set you up with a private space; or

2. Select a hosted solution that will cost you $5/month for as many people as you want to access it (pay for it out of pocket and skip lunch once a month if you have to). PBwiki offers a single password for any member to use; Wikispaces offers a unique ID/password for each member; OR

3. Have a technical developer type you trust download some freeware onto a web accessible server (offsite or behind your company's firewall).

Granted, this approach MAY imply a conflict with some company policies, but you know what happens when you ask first. Just do it and beg forgiveness later. Of course, use common sense - it's not worth getting fired over.

• Organize how you will use it. Play around with it first and get some pointers from someone who is familiar with the particular product you selected. There are lots of ways to organize a wiki, but here is the simplest – The Home Page is just a chronological listing (or any other order you feel comfortable with) of each new task or requirement that comes along. Each item in that listing is actually a page link to a separate Page where the person or team will do the work – all the communications that are normally done in email and any deliverable that comes out of the process.

• Use a simple process. On each new page (requirement) state what needs to be done (the same way you would in an email). List the names of who is responsible. Those people use that page to provide updates, questions, ideas, solutions, tasks completed. On the Home Page, someone can periodically update the status of the various line items.

• Mandate its use by your people. No, you’re not going to ‘try’ something new. You need to explain the layout, how you will be creating pages on the wiki the way you ‘used to create emails’, how your people will communicate on each wiki page instead of email, and how each page will, in effect, be the complete audit trail of whatever was done to work and complete that requirement. Stray emails relevant to any particular task need to be steered back into the wiki with a reminder to senders or receivers (e.g., “Great question/suggestion – see the wiki for the answer.”). Yes, the tone and approach you use with you folks will depend on the culture and personalities of the group – maintain a firm but gentle approach however in requiring its use.

• Constantly review and keep the content current. Now, instead of hammering people with voicemails and emails, you can quickly go through every task and see what has been done, any issues, and leave your own comments/suggestions. Keep the Page links on the Home Page current, but don’t DELETE any links of completed tasks or projects. Cut and paste the Page Links from the Home Page to an Archive Page. You want to keep these links and pages because they are the complete audit trail of everything done for any task your group does. Modify the approach and Page formats as people get used to it and improvement opportunities present themselves.

• Track some basic measures that prove you did the right thing. If you do it right, you either will never have to write another status report OR creating status reports will be a heck of a lot easier. Emails should be reduced substantially. Task and project quality should improve significantly. Cycle times will be reduced. And, perhaps most importantly, you and your people will have a better sense of what is happening, be more relaxed, and generally nicer to work with.

Be positive and flexible. You won’t get it perfect the first time, but you’ll never have to start over. This approach allows you to adapt, improve, act on suggestions, and get everyone to contribute. But you may have to be something of a ‘bad guy’ at first.

Still see obstacles?

Here’s the most likely one – you are just stretched too thin to take the time to start something (easy as it is) that would ultimately get more work done better in a faster time frame with the staff you already have. Catch-22.

Contact me. This is what I do.

And if you are an Executive or decision maker that is feeling the pinch of eroding productivity, how about cutting some slack for your people and just let them do this?

Web 2.0 is Easy - Culture is Hard

TMCnet has this recent BusinessWire title (May 16, 2006):

Gartner Says Web 2.0 Offers Many Opportunities for Growth, But Few Enterprises Will Immediately Adopt All Aspects Necessary for Significant Business Impact

Well, that certainly got my attention – sounds like something I’ve commented upon a couple times. The article describes the three areas that need to be well managed for Web 2.0 technologies to have any significant impact – the technology issues (that’s the easy one), the affected business processes, and the people issues (that's the hard one). These few paragraphs from the article capture the essence of the fundamental problem that I and many others working in this arena have experienced (the underlining is mine for emphasis):

The challenge is that Web 2.0 is not just a set of technologies, but also has attributes that have a social dimension -- new business models, user-contributed content and user-generated metadata, more open and transparent business process, simplicity in design and features and decentralized and participatory products and processes.

"While it is straightforward to add specific technologies, such as Ajax or RSS to products, platforms and applications, it is more difficult to add a social dimension," said David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow.

"Adding these new aspects requires rethinking the design of the system and possibly its target audience. It is therefore more challenging than a cosmetic makeover to the application via Ajax, because it can imply significant changes to the development process, business model and perhaps even the mission of the system under construction," Mr. Smith said. "However, missing out on the non-technology aspects of Web 2.0 means that many organizations will also miss out on some of the positive business benefits."

I have quick anecdote that illustrates this perfectly… A friend of mine has a client (non-wiki related service) that is experimenting with a wiki scenario for project management. Now if you read this blog with any regularity, you know how focused I am on improving productivity, reducing email, and ending up with better quality results through more productive collaboration using the wiki. This enterprise organization is taking the approach of using the wiki as a ‘repository for emails related to a given project’. When asked whether the eventual intent is to wean project members off email and use the wiki directly for communication and collaboration, the answer was, “ Well, we’ll see. They are pretty used to using Lotus Notes for that.”

Contrast that perception with the DrKW case study in my previous post.

Yes, the social aspect is the biggest hurdle and ingrained culture and habits will be the death of Web 2.0 – at least in the enterprise arena.

Obstacles to Wiki Adoption

This is a timely article in light of the last couple posts I’ve written regarding Web 2.0 and productivity. “Genie in a Bottle” (great title) from InformationWorldReview examines some of the obstacles to adoption of the myriad Web 2.0 tools (including wikis).

The word ‘productivity’ appears twice…here –

New systems of any kind involve a disruption of existing work practices and a negative impact on productivity in the short term. A typical response from one senior salesman in a large multinational was: “I try and do my job rather than keep up.” So inconvenience and, for sales people, a consequent loss of income is another fear.

And here -

Even if a company has a fairly transparent culture, it may still be wary of introducing these new systems. The management is probably tired of hearing promises about improved productivity from an endless succession of software salespeople in the past. “Invest hundreds of thousands in this knowledge management system, it makes staff more effective and increases the organisation’s intellectual capital at the same time”. Except, very often, it didn’t work out that way. Fingers were burnt and budgets sacrificed.

That comment along with the next are points I’ve made in the past about the damage done by undelivered promises from expensive enterprise system implementations:

Neil Macehiter, a partner in IT and business alignment advisory firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton and one-time Ovum analyst, points out that: “Knowledge management, collaborative software and intranets just didn’t move high enough up the corporate agenda. Significant investments were made and the hoped for returns didn’t materialise.”

I stand by my previous posts about the disconnect between Web 2.0 ‘solutions’ and enterprise productivity ‘problems’ that need solutions. The two primary sources of resistance appear to be management fear of losing control and user apathy.

Some of the 'Management' perceptions from the article:

• ...social computing on a wide scale has the potential to shift the power structure of an organisation irreversibly
• ...companies don’t want their employees to have a voice, to answer back or to question the management
• Leakage of essentially private information or opinion is a major concern for companies
• ...organisations find it difficult to trust their employees to behave responsibly and not leak information or fritter time away when using these new systems
• ...concerned about training costs and the likely hit on staff performance as new systems are adopted

Some 'Employee' perceptions:

• ...older people will do their best to avoid learning new ways of working
• ...people will perceive different threats from social software according to their role in the organisation
• ...they are likely to be afraid of the unknown
• ...knee-jerk reaction will be to refuse to adopt it unless forced
• ...managers and staff are afraid of embarrassing themselves through the kind of exposure that social computing brings

This comment validates a point I’ve made in the past about the disconnect between the Web 2.0 hype I am reading and the reality I actually see in the corporate enterprise

Jaap Favier, vice president and research director of Forrester Research, highlights another issue. “I’ve spoken to quite a lot of executive boards over the past few months and I started to see a very simple answer to why organisations aren’t looking at social computing,” he says. “It’s because senior executives are alpha males. Being in control is what they’re good at and what they like, which is what brought them to the board seat to begin with. Sharing power is not part of their genes.”

My only question is this – with all this reluctance, paranoia, secrecy, and control obsession, how do these companies actually survive?

Or will they survive? We'll see.

Wikis and Blogs Transforming Workflow

I found this article by Shamus McGillicuddy of SearchCIO.com that has a similar theme to my recent email rant (but much more in depth). The first line from the article:

Why e-mail when you can wiki?

This quote nicely summarizes the impact wiki has over email for the organization:

E-mail has proven itself to be an indispensable form of communication, but it has limits as a collaborative tool, experts agree. Enterprise content management systems are important for codifying and organizing important corporate data, but they can be expensive and inflexible. Blogs and wikis can fill in the collaborative gap.

I am giving a presentation next month to a large group of authors who are relatively new to using a wiki. That phrase - "fill in the collaborative gap" - is a key concept that is lost on most non-users. The lack of that perception is the biggest obstacle to feeling comfortable about using wikis.

Email is to individuals what wikis are to groups.

Wiki Adoption

Thanks, Suw Charman, for a great post describing the attributes needed to successfully promote the adoption of wiki(s) in any enterprise. Suw writes her 'Strange Attractor' blog over at Corante. Corante is collection of blogs by writers on a variety of topics from science and marketing to Web 2.0 and the law.

What follows is the topic outline from Suw's piece. I've stated many of these suggestions in the past, but her post summarizes it very nicely for the organization that want's to do it right:

Fostering grassroots adoption

1. Identify key user groups
2. Identify and understand key users
3. Convert key users into evangelists
4. Turn evangelists into trainers
5. Support bottom-up adoption and emergent behaviours

Management support

1. Lead by example
2. Lead by mandate
3. Lead by reminding
4. Ensure there is adequate support
5. Ensure personal and business benefits reflect each other

Remember what your goals really are

These summary comments from the post capture the essence of what the organization needs to keep in mind:

...it takes a significant amount of time for adoption to take place. Having a clear adoption strategy, and ensuring that the correct key players are identified and 'converted', helps to speed up the process, but it remains a fact of human nature that it takes time for people to become comfortable with new technology, new ways of doing things and, most importantly, new cultures...

Adoption isn't a goal in and of itself. Lots of people use email an awful lot, but that doesn't mean that it's being used well. Think about what your ultimate aims are; make them discrete, measurable and attainable. Go for 'reducing occupational spam', for example, rather than 'improve communications'. Measure your email usage before you start, monitor it whilst you adopt, and report back regularly so that people can see the progress that they are collectively making

The only thought I would add relates to that phrase I underlined. Profiling has some negative connotations, but the reality is you need to profile those people who have the right social, process, and organizational skills to actually be evangelists. Pushing someone to be an evangelist who doesn't really get it ends up in futility for that person and the organization.

Find the right people to run with it and then let them.