“Blogs and wikis are dead.”

This caused quite a stir in the room, and more than a few follow-up questions during the breaks. So I thought I would expand on this statement here. Let’s start with wikis.

Wikis

Wikis aren’t the easiest tool to use. While wikipedia has been a stratospheric success, this hasn’t translated into huge adoption for wikis. Most people don’t know what they are, and this number is falling rather than growing.

One of the problems is wiki markup, which I’ve argued against in the past (wiki markup has no future). Even the wiki products themselves are ditching wiki markup, replacing it with WYSIWYG editing.

So while we should be doing more collaborative content creation, it needs to be simpler and more intuitive than wikis.

Blogs

Let’s face it, blogs have struggled within the enterprise. It’s a great idea to give a voice to senior management and key experts, but people are hesitant to take up the baton. In part, it’s the name “blogs”, which can be quite intimidating. It also takes real commitment to keep blogging, and it’s hard to sustain in the medium to long term.

Why not just add commenting to news? And then open up news so that most (all?) staff can post news items. (This is something I’ll be covering in an article soon.) Better this than a separate “blog central” that competes with other communication channels.

Escaping tools

Both wikis and blogs sell a technology. They are fundamentally geeky tools, alongside RSS and personalisation. The majority of staff don’t really understand them, beyond a vague familiarity with the name.

Am I arguing against collaboration and social tools? Quite the opposite! We need to substantially grow these capabilities within organisations, and spread their adoption and use.

But instead of pushing tools and functionality, each delivered on a separate platform, we should be providing simple, integrated and coordinated experiences. Facebook doesn’t need to provide a “blog central” and “video central” — these are just two elements of the overall solution (they don’t even get a distinct name).

So let’s stop talking about “blogs and wikis”, and instead talk more about helping staff to work better together.

The figures in this year’s report clearly show that senior managers in many large organizations are using blogs to improve communication flow, to break through some of the barriers and silos. However, there is still a lot some of them need to learn about blogging!

In BT anyone can start a blog or create a wiki article internally about their views and opinions and can contribute to other blogs or wiki articles if they wish to. To get started all you need to do is email the administrator and sign up to the terms of use – nothing slanderous; illegal; breaks BT’s policies – that are basic common sense rules. We treat people as adults in BT and they have responded by behaving responsibly.

We’re steadily working our way through Australia, and have just announced a Melbourne date for our Succeeding at collaboration workshop (10 September 2009). As usual, there are only 10 places, so these will sell out quickly! Key details:

SharePoint, wikis and blogs are bringing collaboration capabilities into many organisations, and are spreading rapidly. This intensive session will help you put in place strategy and governance that ensures that these tools are successful and valuable.

Collaboration brings many opportunities, and can transform how organisations work. But: the unmanaged spread of collaboration tools can be ‘anti knowledge sharing’, fragmenting information and hiding documents in many individual silos.

There are many questions to answer:

• What are the true benefits of collaboration?
• Why does collaboration succeed in some cases, and fail in others?
• What management and governance should be put in place?
• Which collaboration tools should be used?
• Do these tools replace the intranet?

The workshop will be facilitated by James Robertson, managing director of Step Two Designs, recognised as an expert on collaboration and knowledge management. Author of over 200 articles, and the soon-to-be-released Which collaboration tool? report, James has keynoted conferences and workshops around the globe.

When: 10 September 2009, 9am – 5pm

Where: The Guild Group, Hawthorn, Melbourne

How much: $750 + GST (25% discount for Intranet Leadership Forum members)

Full event details and registration

While talking to people after presenting ‘Adding value to your intranet – Intranet governance at BT‘ at Intranätdagarna 2009 in Stockholm last week it made me realise some simple steps could help an intranet blog or wiki be successful or not so.

He then follows it up with more advanced steps to a good intranet wiki/blog. To quote:

In BT anyone can start a blog or create a wiki article internally about their views and opinions and can contribute to other blogs or wiki articles if they wish to. To get started all you need to do is email the administrator and sign up to the terms of use – nothing slanderous; illegal; breaks BT’s policies – that are basic common sense rules. We treat people as adults in BT and they have responded by behaving responsibly.

These questions come up frequently for intranet and internal communication teams. This article will outline:

• some best practice examples of policies and guidelines
• several different models and approaches for moderating online discussion
• the need for a clear post-launch strategy to encourage discussion

Fundamental to success

One point to recognise is that good governance and moderation is vital to the success of these platforms. But there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, either.

Many organisations share similar concerns about online employee discussion. But the differences between organisations — in size, culture, history and employee experience — are important factors in whether and how moderation is implemented.

Establishing guidelines

The first step with any online discussion platform should be to establish some guidelines about what will and will not be acceptable. For example, any abusive language and explicit content are obvious exclusions, but just how far will you let something such as criticism go? Allowing people to complain endlessly about not having a vending machine on their floor is asking for trouble, but allowing genuine problems to surface could well be a primary aim. Such questions need to be addressed at an early stage of planning.

[April KM Column by Alex Manchester, read the full article]

Feeling part of a team

It is difficult to replicate ‘water-cooler’ chat with remote staff but it is becoming easier. A number of tools are now available to support individuals working in remote teams. In order for these tools to work, there must be a ‘connection’ established first. If two colleagues don’t communicate beforehand, providing access to instant messaging tools is not going to make them talk.

Commitment to communicate

Keeping the connection with staff can be difficult. It is easy to fall into the trap of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. All members of a team are responsible for keeping in touch with colleagues.

A variety of tools can be used to help remote staff feel connected, but there needs to be a commitment to ‘keeping in touch’ for this to work. No technology can replace those personal interactions.

Making an effort to call, message or email on a regular basis can help manage the sense of isolation often felt by teams working remotely from each other.

Head office or branch staff need to make an effort to find out more about remote staff, their interests, goals and location.

[CMb 2009-02 by Rebecca Rodgers, read the full article]

For me these days a blog is little more than a sophisticated, easy-to-use website platform. A place where an individual or a department/function can have their own site quickly and easily. Simplistic that may be, but whether news posts or thought articles, the commenting or conversation aspect of blogging appears to by dying down in many places (just recently there was a flurry of blog posts suggesting that “comments were dead” – a scary thought for many companies just flicking the “On” switch on their corporate blogging initiatives….).

What do you think? I’ve already added my thoughts to Alex’s post…

There is undoubtedly a large amount of online chatting, blogging and social networking going on out there on the world wide web. Even so, organisations often find it difficult to dig these people out from within the internal ranks.

So what is required for effective online collaboration? And what are some strategies for achieving this? Two important prerequisites are:

• key people who have experience using collaboration tools
• people within the organisation who are already working together

Without these two things the mere appearance of collaboration tools will not enable people to use the tools effectively or compel people to work together when they are not already doing so. Using online tools is a discipline — at the very least it is a habit — and key people who are already ‘walking the walk’ are an integral part of the solution. Without these people, would-be collaborators have no models for collaboration.

If you can tick these two boxes and if you are a lone voice, or part of a very small niche group in a very large organisation, this article explores methods for building this capability within organisations. The recent experience of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is used to demonstrate the approach.

[August KM Column by Cairo Walker, read the full article]