It’s a Wiki-Wonderland

Add comment February 21st, 2008 David Bush - Iasta

Industry Week recently ran an article on 7 strategies for implementing a successful corporate wiki which I found illuminating not for the strategies, as Iasta has already gone down the road of implementing wikis both internally and externally, but because it recognizes the importance of the wiki as a collaboration and knowledge sharing tool within an organization.

The article notes that businesses must enlist technologies that will help workers stay connected while they collaborate on internal projects. This is especially important if your workforce is geographically spread out. Furthermore, in today’s workplace, workers come and go, and it’s important to capture their knowledge before they retire, resign, or move on to another position in the company.

As the author notes, before you start off down the markup-tagged road, you need to assess for yourself what can be done to ensure employees use wikis productively and for the larger good, and design your wiki to meet the criteria you identify. To help you with this, the following strategies were presented:

• integrate the wiki as one of several tools in the collaboration architecture
• define, monitor, and enforce the wiki rules of conduct
• optimize the use of wikis for collaborative knowledge creation
• assign a champion to encourage adoption and use of each wiki
• realize that the largest barrier will be convincing your employees to edit the work of their peers
• incorporate small scripts that structure and automate repetitive behaviors
• constantly encourage collaboration in the work place

Entry Filed under: General, Technology