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Self-service publishing: Implement with care

Abigail Lewis-Bowen writes about carefully implementing wikis and other enterprise 2.0 tools. To quote:

First of all, it's important to provide Wikis and Blogs only after processes for publishing “formal” information channels to the Intranet are well established. If the right people are publishing to the right place on the Intranet, and there is good editorial workflow and governance, then the Intranet is sturdy enough to add an open, less-structured layer of content. If there are no good controls in place, then handing everyone a Wiki to use will blur the lines between informal and formal communication. What’s worse, it may threaten the information structure needed to support robust personalization and effective information discovery.

This is an interesting post, and I agree with Abigail about the potential dangers of collaboration tools (see my article Collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing?). Abigail also makes some excellent, and very practical suggestions. Yet I was also uncomfortable about the overall approach.

Thinking about it further, these are my concerns:

• Abigail recommends waiting until the intranet is well-managed before rolling out tools such as wikis. We don't have that long. Like it or not, these tools are rapidly spreading and we have to put in place some management models as a matter of urgency.
• The suggestions are written as rules designed to be "barriers to entry". The problem is, we can't actually enforce them, as no-one reports to us.
• Worse yet, some of these rules are written as if wikis are the "enemy" that must be boxed in. Do we have automated expiry of content on our intranets, as we are suggesting for wikis? I think not.
• The danger is that by adding a large amount of extra work (such as mandatory metadata), collaboration tools will simply fail to take off.
• At the end of the day, we need to find ways of engaging with the wider organisation on these topics, rather than being seen as "gatekeepers".

Again, though, some great suggestions. The more we discuss these topics the better...

Posted by jamesr on January 17, 2008 07:30 AM
Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets