Now, wikis are not a silver bullet to our information and content management challenges, and I have argued that a wiki as an intranet is an intranet. That being said, I think content management vendors and intranet teams can learn from wiki products, and can make some simple changes to improve outcomes:

• Intranets were never meant to be updated by just a core group of publishers. Instead, the goal was always to have the “business own their own content”. Wikis should remind intranet teams that having broad engagement in the intranet is necessary for success.
• Intranets, regardless of the publishing tool used, should have a “edit this page” button available everywhere. Staff should then be provided with a simple front-end interface for updating content, without the hassles and complexities all too often imposed by CMS products.
• Workflow should then be turned off for most areas of the intranet (as workflow doesn’t work). Instead, like wikis, there should be universal versioning and a focus on quickly updating content rather than trying to “get it right” before publishing.
• The focus should be on accountability and transparency, rather than security.
• The bottom-up ease of creating new pages in wikis should also be replicated by intranet teams. While wiki advocates fail to look beyond initial organic growth, they can achieve much greater levels of involvement from staff.
• Perhaps most broadly, intranet teams should aim to generate the same culture of content that wikis can achieve. That is, the sense of community and personal involvement in content, rather than the “intranet as corporate repository”.

At the end of the day, I don’t care about the publishing tools that underpin the intranet, as long as they work and are used appropriately. I am also not arguing for throwing away our intranets and replacing them with wikis. That would be naive.

It is, however, a good time to take a fresh look at how we manage and grow our intranets, and to learn lessons from the wider community.

Thoughts, comments?