Internal Selling Wikis to the Corporation

One way to bring the topic of Wiki up is to look for trigger factors. When people leave the company, don’t their laptop hard drives get wiped? That’s a massive loss of knowhow. No executives would go unconcerned about how much informal knowledge about a project that gets flushed.

The main objections to wikis are:
1) adoption. People don’t give up their habits easily. Some wikis are designed around e-mails. This is pretty cool. You can CC your e-mail to a special email address that belongs to the wiki, and it’ll put it up on the intranet webpage.
2) Loss of control. There are already document management systems in-place. The person in charge is going to feel threatened. To counter this objection, explain that the document management was never going to archive informal emails, and work in progress. These are at the moment going into whiteboards, pieces of A4 notepads, stick it notes. The wiki is just another piece of stationery where ideas can go on. It’s the place for ideas that belong to a group of people.
3) Legal discovery. When a SNAFU happens in a project and lawyers take over, suddenly it becomes easy to find out that some one is negligent in doing something because there is a paper trail now. Well… There are wikis which implement simple document retention / document disposal strategies that comply with corporate record keeping policies.

The reality of corporate document management is they are more about filing stuff away than for keeping track of live interactions. They are also designed according to a corporate hierarchy: who works in what department, what are their formal roles. Real work is done through social interactions, not necessarily bounded by some preconception of the nature of work is about. A personal assistant might hold data critical to a project, such as someone’s scheduled flights.

If you can answer yes to the next two questions:
1) Do you have a computer that’s always on?
2) Does the computer have 2 Gb of disk space available?
If so, you are very close to having a live wiki in your intranet for assessment. No point of talking and musing over how people might use an electronic vefsion of a whiteboard. Just put one in people’s work environemnt and observe how they use it.