“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.

Bundaberg City Council (BuCC) started using a Wiki to help manage its assets in mid 2006.
When BuCC was amalgamated with three other municipalities in March 2008 (Burnett Shire, Isis Shire & Kolan Shire) the wiki concept was adopted by the new Bundaberg Regional Council.

Council’s IT Department set up a MediaWiki based wiki to help them with IT related tasks, but it soon became apparent that it could be used for much more including the publishing of asset management related information.

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.

NYK is one of the world’s largest shipping and transport firms, with 770 major ships sailing the oceans. In an incredibly competitive market, it is vital to quickly respond to industry changes and competitor moves.

To facilitate this, NYK established a wiki-based intranet news room that allows every staff member to share industry news and more. Hear about their philosophy, approach and the benefits this has delivered.

The 7 minute video covers:

• What are the business challenges for NYK?
• What is the NYK Newsroom?
• How is the wiki being used?
• Advice for other organisations?

As always, full details and screenshots are available in Intranet Innovations 2009, the annual report that showcases the present and future of intranets globally.

Post 7 of 10 in a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.

NYK’s business is global shipping and it’s one of the world’s leading transportation companies with over 770 shipping vessels.

The NYK News Room is wiki-based, and thus multi-faceted in its content, subscription options and viewing opportunities. It provides numerous improvements over the existing information service used by NYK, and is cheaper and has a far more extensive ‘reach’ to employees.

There were two key drivers for developing the News Room. The first was that NYK staff needed to share and manage key market information in real time. This included competitors, customers, the markets and internal news from a disparate Group of 100 different European companies.

The second driver was that Group Communications were tasked with cutting costs and needed to reduce the number of subscriptions by staff to industry news services. These cost up to £400 per person and gave them access to online news releases.

Any solution to these problems also had to be low cost, so the NYK team looked to build on their corporate wiki, which had been going for over a year.

Creating a separate news area, and replacing individual news licenses with a business-wide digital news licence, while developing a range of subscription and contribution methods for employees, led to:

• improved business intelligence
• efficiency in news delivery
• cost savings

As with many other winners, the identification of a problem and a smartly-designed solution are the key traits with NYK’s entry.

(For full details of this Award-winning entry, obtain a copy of the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)

Last week I was talking to someone about enterprise wiki adoption. I ended up sketching a rough diagram like this so we could talk about the need to design (in an active, participatory sense) social computing environments that provide enough information scaffolding so that users can be productive at the beginning but that also allow emergent, socially negotiated information structures and usage patterns to develop over time.

BTpedia was created in 2007. Beta testing with users has led to a small application becoming a critical place for people to share how to do things in BT. Without advertising or publicity it has grown to over 2,000 articles and is linked from the BT Homepage and searched like other content areas.

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

Choosing the right wiki for your team, project, or organization is essential. The right tool will help catalyze adoption, encourage continued use, and help people get their work done well. So how can you find the best enterprise wiki for your needs?

I’m publishing the Enterprise Wiki Software Guide to help you get started. The guide contains descriptions and screenshots of twelve wikis that are designed with business and organizational needs in mind.

I wrote a few months ago about keeping the chaff out of your site with a regular Wiki Spring Cleaning. This is just one in a set of activities often referred to as Wiki Gardening. Now that it is actually Spring, I thought it a good time to summarize these activities and talk a bit about why they are important for any wiki. Beyond just wikis, these are important activities for any relatively large web site. It’s just a lot easier to do in a wiki.

The software selected provided a vehicle for JetBlue faculty to talk to one another, not just about process improvements in learning & development, but also to share photos from family vacations, weddings and birthdays. The thinking behind this choice was that as the faculty got to know one another better as individuals, they would more easily share lessons and best practices as professionals.

(I love the use of video to share details of these types of case studies, definitely makes them much more engaging.)

CorVu produces software that assists other enterprises to implement their strategy and to track their performance against that strategy over time. CorVu has a variety of channels for making its internal product knowledge available to its customers, but the product functionality grows at a faster rate than the Tech Writers can keep up with. Apart from the fundamental description of each feature, a complex assortment of configuration details need to be documented – performance optimization, best-practice implementation techniques, interactions with third-party software, etc. A lot of knowledge at that level resides with the Professional Services team rather than the Product Development team. Often, the people with the knowledge do not have the time nor the writing skills to record it, and the people with the responsibility to deliver documentation to the customers do not have the knowledge. There’s nothing uncommon about that problem!

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.

Today we are continuing our series of visual representations of social media tools inside organizations, taken from our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report. The diagram below was used in the chapter on wikis in the enterprise, to illustrate how wikis can be used in organizational activities.

There are dozens of different wikis, from free open source models to commercial enterprise packages. Use your list of criteria to research the available options and evaluate each to see how it fits your team. Plan for the scope of the wiki, will your studio need to host tens of thousands of pages or hundreds of thousands? How many users will access it simultaneously? Will the server hosting it be local or remote? All of these factors will affect the speed at which users can work, and faster is always better. www.wikimatrix.org is an excellent comparison tool.

[Thanks to Stewart Mader.]