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We have written about BrainKeeper being a great collaboration solution for your organization's collaboration strategy, but there are a number of easy things that you can do right now to ensure your wiki stays up to date and continues to be a valuable resource for everyone. Here are 5 things that you can do to update your enterprise wiki:
1. Put content where people will find it. This seems simple, but just dropping a wiki page into a Workspace might result in it being lost. Also, don't be afraid to put in the effort to change things around when you feel it is necessary. The extra time and effort that you spend to reorganize your content can make a huge difference.
2. Create "linkable" wiki pages. What this means is to take content that relates to many other topics, and dedicate a single page to it. This makes it easier for people to refer to more targeted information. For example, if you have a client that is also a partner, you may have details about that company in multiple pages. By putting all of the client/partner information into a wiki page by itself, anyone can link to that page to get all of the important details they need.
3. Combine similar pages, break up long ones. Often, multiple pages are created that are very closely related, have duplicate content, or naturally seem to fit together. Combining these into few pages will help you create a single 'authority' on a particular topic. The other side of this is that pages can become very long and cumbersome to read. Where there are natural sub-topics, you can create sub-pages so that people can better target the information they are looking for.
4. Understand and analyze to what you do. Often, valuable insights can be gained by thinking about what was removed, combined, moved or broken apart. This will help teach others about the best way to contribute information in the future, so that the process can essentially manage itself.
5. Engage people. Create a Forum to discuss ways in which you can better use your wiki. Or, discuss the features that you would like to see added to BrainKeeper to make it a better tool for you. You can even invite us to these conversations so that you can hear our perspective and thoughts about your ideas. You might be the source for our next great feature!
Want more tips, ideas, and best practices for your wiki? Just let us know, and we would be happy to help in any way we can.
Giving everyone in your organization the ability to contribute new information, modify knowledge that is outdated, and delete content that is inaccurate or irrelevant are some of the core benefits that you get from having an enterprise wiki. The thought here is that it is in everyone's best interest to have the wiki as up-to-date, relevant, and complete as possible. But, there could be much more value in your wiki than just this.
In an environment where anyone can change the actual structure of your content, you have an opportunity to see how people really think about the information that they need to do their jobs. You can learn quite a bit about how your organization actually works (rather than how you think it works, or even how you want it to work).
For example, your organization may have many departments that work together on projects. Naturally, you would want to foster as much collaboration between the departments as possible, so you may create a Workspace for each project to accomplish this. As you continue to use the wiki, you might see new Workspaces being created for each department, with their own status updates, work product, and other bits of information. What can you learn from this?
Perhaps your organization is more stove-piped than you want it to be, or perhaps there are areas of your organization that should be more isolated. In either case, the way people have decided to use your wiki can tell you a lot about how collaboration actually happens. You might embrace this, or you might act to change it- but you have a great insight to determine how to move forward with your collaboration strategy.
While simply getting information into your Wiki is crucially important to your success (see Something is Better than Nothing), ensuring that things are developed and improved upon is just as critical. Having tons of Wiki pages that are in some stage of incompleteness can mean that you don't have 100% of the information you need to answer a key question or get something done. If you see something that is lacking additional information or context that you can contribute to- add to it. Again, even if you do not know everything about the subject or topic, you probably know something that will help make the existing information more complete. It is rare to find one person that knows everything about a subject, but if you get 5 people with knowledge of a topic to collaborate on the same Wiki page or section, chances are you will end up with a treasure trove of information. The true strength of a Wiki comes from the total combined knowledge of every contributor. We have found that this is also one of the best ways to get new users to become comfortable with the idea of using Wiki Software. Adding bits of knowledge to 10 wiki pages can be more valuable than creating a brand new Wiki page- and often, these bits of knowledge are exactly what people are looking for. One sentence could mean the difference between getting an answer in 5 minutes instead of the half hour to track someone down (who might not even have the right answer!). As someone with a vested interest in making your Wiki as complete as possible, you should do everything you can to encourage the other users of your Wiki to help improve existing Wiki pages, as this can go a long way towards keeping information current, up to date and accurate.
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.
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."
If you are part of a distributed team using a wiki to collaborate on anything from new product development to customer support, you already know this statement to be true. Wikis and wiki-type software can be very powerful, used to not only keep everyone up to date on all aspects of work on a project, but also to have a place where everyone can contribute the expertise and perspective that others will find valuable.
The authors go on to say: "By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control."
Using the open nature of a wiki, allowing everyone to contribute towards building a better product (customer support information, product documentation, etc.) is an easy way not only to harness the collective intelligence of your employees, but also can provide a way to leverage the knowledge of your partners as well. Your partners can offer very specialized, highly relevant, extremely valuable information- which you can store in the context of your own knowledge. So, having a centralized system to help gather and leverage this knowledge can pay huge dividends.
Knowledge 'Gatekeepers' (the select few people in the organization who capture, document, and report on the knowledge) can be barriers to collaboration if they are overwhelmed or if there are not efficient processes to get information to them. A true collaborative environment ensures that knowledge is managed quickly and that the knowledge itself is accurate and current.
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