There are plenty of examples of individuals, teams, and entire organizations getting a wiki setup, but where the expected impact was simply not there.  This might be from expectations that were too high, less-than-stellar communication about what the wiki was for, or the lack of a champion that pushed adoption. However, the most common reason that a wiki initiative sputters out is that people don't see the value (or don't see enough value) to make it worth changing the way they work- even by the small amount that is required for good enterprise wikis.

Based on our experience, we have identified several things that you can do to revitalize your wiki:

1. Talk to Your Wiki Provider
We have seen hundreds of wiki implementations.  You can talk to us about why you got the wiki in the first place and discuss thoughts on why it hasn't worked as well as you would have liked.  In most cases, at the end of a 30 minute conversation, you will have several ideas to get people back into your wiki.

2. Simple = Success
People can sometimes bite off more than they can chew.  Expecting that you will be able to use a wiki to immediately address 10 - 20 issues that your organization has is not reasonable.  You will end up making progress on only a few of those issues- and not enough to solve any one of them.  By picking just one issue, or even one aspect of an issue (like communicating customer announcements to internal staff), you will be able to focus your team on a great use case for your wiki- and have a great example to build from.

3. Build on What Works
There may be a rare case in which you would start from scratch with your content, but most likely, there are portions of your wiki that serve a valuable function.  Interview people in your organization to find out what is useful, then archive what is not.  Now you can continue to build on the content that is valuable, and people will have a great resource for those topics.

4. Address the Problem AND the Perception
Create a wiki page where everyone can contribute their thoughts and issues with your wiki.  Most of the time there are only a couple major points from each person- and most of those will usually be the same concerns.  Once you have the issues out in the open, work with the people who contributed those ideas to find solutions.   By getting buy-in from some of the more vocal and respected people in your organization, you will get better use out of your wiki, and others will follow suit.  The people who helped create the poor perception of the wiki will then be advocates for it.

5. Create a Method of Feedback
Make sure that you don't stop this process after implementing some of the ideas above- or implementing any of your own ideas!  Other issues will emerge as your organization changes (growth, process changes, responsibilities shifting, etc.) and you need to have a method to capture the concerns that people have.  A wiki page can work quite well for this, but someone needs to be actively monitoring it.  It is essential to take action on people's concerns- and then to communicate the action that has been taken.  If people feel that their ideas are taken seriously, and they see progress being made, they will be very likely to continue giving you the feedback you need to make your wiki a great success.

CIO Insight recently published an excellent article, Collaboration: Unlocking the Power of Teams, which details the Ziff Davis Enterprise 2008 Collaboration Survey.  While the article is extremely interesting and well worth the read, some of the statistics from the survey are simply astounding.

"We discovered that about 80 percent of IT executives believe collaboration and workflow technologies deliver on their promise to boost productivity and decision-making, and half say they enable and even inspire strategies that were previously unattainable or unimaginable."

With findings like that, it's no wonder that:

"Organizations will increase their spending on collaboration software by 14.8 percent in 2008, according to the Ziff Davis Enterprise February 2008 IT Spending Survey. "

Additionaly, the graphic on Page 4 of the article shows that while Wikis are ranked as the 16th most used collaboration technology within Organizations, they are the 4th most used without IT Support.  So eventhough 20% of the responding organizations use Wikis without the support of their IT department, they are still used more than other technologies such as Blogs (22nd) and Realtime Document Collaboration (21st).  Furthermore, while Discussion Forums have been a mainstay on the (consumer) web for many years now, Wikis were tied with Discussion Forums as 16th most used.

If you are interested in what technologies are most used or percieved as being most valuable, this article is definitely worth a read.

You have emails...lots and lots of emails!  Don't we all?  Each email is usually either a notification from someone or an ongoing discussion between two or more people (hopefully you aren't emailing yourself!). 

These "discussion" emails generally allow you to scroll through all previous messages in order to get your bearings on the conversation, but what happens if the whole thread is not included?  Or when you forward the discussion on to someone else and then you have 2 "copies" of the discussion going on with 2 groups of people?  Sound familiar?  What you need is not just context, but "context-state".

So, what is context-state, you ask?  Let's define it first:

Con - text n.
The part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning
Dictionary.com

State n.
The condition of a person or thing, as with respect to circumstances or attributes.

Dictionary.com

Taking these two definitions together, context-state would be something like:

The condition of a text or statement used to determine its meaning

Okay, this time so it actually makes sense:

The ability to look at some text (information) and always have the necessary information to easily determine the context of that text.

This is exactly what email cannot do.  Will your email software tell you about the Word document on your desktop related to the conversation?  Or the Excel spreadsheet in you're My Documents folder that really needs to be reviewed in order to fully understand the content of the email?  Probably not.

Enter a Wiki.  Not just any Wiki mind you, but a good Enterprise Wiki.  One that allows you to capture your knowledge, tag (categorize) it, attach related files, invite other people to comment on it and determine who should be able to view or edit it with Wiki Permissions.

Obviously, we are a little biased, and fully believe that the BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki solves this problem better than most, but solving the problem is more important than the Enterprise Wiki tool that you use to solve it.

Back to our example:
That email you are about to send off to 5 people to kick-start a conversation, put it into your Wiki instead as a Wiki Page.  Now, email the page (from within your Wiki of course) to those same 5 people, and ask them to add some comments to the page, or (gasp) go real crazy and ask them to just edit it (don't worry, you'll be able to see who made what changes later). 

So, now you have this conversation happening within your Wiki, and everyone is on the same "Page" with this conversational knowledge.  Now what?  Why not add a tag or two to the Page?  This not only provides additional context so that other people know the topics covered within the Page, but also allows even deeper context by providing the ability to browse those tags and see other related content . 

By tagging your information within an online Wiki (state!), you can extend its context, and therefore make it easier for other people to quickly figure out what is going on (context-state!).

So, you ask again, what is context-state? Is it putting your knowledge where others can access it?  Attaching related files to it?  Tagging that knowledge?  It's all of the above, and then some.  It's also being able to see who has made the most changes and who is truly the Expert for specific knowledge.

Wikis are great tools; combine them with Blogs for your Organization and they are even better.  Use them to their fullest, and you might think that they were sent from above.

The McKinsey Quarterly recently released an article, Eight business technology trends to watch (Free login required), which includes a great section on delivering content that has been created by a group of people. They call this Distributing Cocreation and while the examples they use range from the building of the Linux operating system to Loncin, a Chinese motorcycle manufacturer, the core of the discussion is summed up nicely in the section's opening sentence:"The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries."

Email is a great communication tool, but it is not a great tool for collaboration.  By the very nature of email, the only people who benefit from the knowledge contained within them are the people on the trail.  Since everyone in a company does not operate on a shared In-box, ideas and decisions will always lack a degree of perspective and creativity- and they will be less thorough.

When you are building knowledge that others can benefit from, working with clients and partners, or making decisions that affect other aspects of the company- a wiki is a perfect tool.  Using this criteria, our subscribers have decreased their email traffic by over 30%!  No more FYI emails, no more having to answer repetitive questions, and no more searching your email for a nugget of information that you know is trapped in an email somewhere...

The bottom line is that wikis give you the right tool for collaboration.  Wikis are not a replacement for email- they are a replacement for a void that email was filling for us, temporarily.  Organizations now have the perfect tool to improve both communication and collaboration.  To see how BrainKeeper does this, sign up for a free trial.

We have known for quite a while that people, teams and businesses have trouble managing their electronic information.  But the findings of a recent research report by the content management company AIIM put a number to the level of pain that is felt by this lack of management: 52% of companies rate their overall effectiveness in managing electronic information as terrible.

Certainly, the number is staggering enough, but to call the existing management of information "terrible" is also very telling.  I believe the reason for this is that it is so easy to get electronic information management wrong.  As a company grows, changes, and matures, the structures and processes put in place lose their effectiveness and have to be modified.  But in the case of electronic information, there is usually so much data that the job of managing it is completely impossible.

The common culprits of poor information management are shared network drives (where nothing can be found), isolated repositories (from a thumb drive to an old desktop that is still clinging to the network because you have hidden it under your desk), and 'Gatekeepers' (those people who make a living by being the single source for creating and maintaining large amounts of information).  These are the problems that we hoped to solve with the BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki.

We have enough structure to help you find what you are looking for, but it is flexible to be easily modified if needed.  Tagging and other classification capabilities also help build structures on the fly so that content is constantly updated to be relevant to what matters to your company today- not 5 years ago.  The idea that anyone can contribute anything for the greater good breaks down all real and perceived barriers to getting ideas and opinions out of your staff.

Software should empower you to do a better job- whatever your job is.  A wiki is the most empowering software that you can offer to your team and your organization.  See how one can work for you with a free trial.

Over the past few months, we have demonstrated how BrainKeeper can provide a great deal of value to Fortune 500 companies as well as SMBs.  Our products scale very well, and we continue to focus on building features that make collaboration and knowledge management incredibly simple.

The main reason people tell us that they purchase BrainKeeper over others is because our product is so intuitive and easy to use.  This also makes BrainKeeper relatively easy to sell.  If you are a business manager who needs a better way to communicate with clients, partners, and internal team members- BrainKeeper is an ideal solution. 

The combination of a proven Enterprise Wiki solution with a simple sales effort has created quite a bit of interest in an affiliate program.  We have decided to embrace this idea and create the first official BrainKeeper Affiliate Program.  Currently, we are running several pilot affiliate relationships to ensure that the program is exactly what we want it to be: a way for us to get the word out about BrainKeeper, and a revenue generating channel for our affiliates.

Our pilot program (essentially a more mature 'beta') is still open for a few more participants, but we expect to have this program up and running soon- so if you are interested, please contact us at info@brainkeeper.com.  We look forward to hearing from you.

For additional contact information, please visit us at www.brainkeeper.com/corp/contact.php.

We continue to be encouraged by the number and types of organizations that find wikis to be an effective tool for managing knowledge and communication.  BrainKeeper earned the subscription of a major telecommunications and media conglomerate this week, which adds to our list of marquee customers in the industries of technology, education, and consulting.  All of these may seem like they would be a natural fit for an Enterprise Wiki tool, but we have seen a number of our subscribers come from markets outside of those that might find wiki's to be attractive.

We also have a number of significant clients in the fields of Law, Healthcare, Tax, Pharmaceuticals, Veterinary Medicine, Finance, Architecture, Manufacturing, and Retail.  It shows that everyone is looking for collaboration solutions- and a wiki is the next stage of enterprise collaboration that answers a number of problems with email, chat, and other more traditional communication methods.

With our next enhancement release, we will continue to focus on more and better ways to capture, collaborate, and deliver information to you and the people you work with.  We welcome any thoughts you might have toward this, and invite you to take a free trial of BrainKeeper to see it for yourself.