What does it take to pull off a successful wiki? Jeffrey Walker of Atlassian and Linda Skrocki, Sr. Enginering Program Manager for Blogs, Wikis, and Forums at Sun Microsystems showed examples of successful enterprise-level wikis plus offered advice on how to pull off a successful wiki in your enterprise.
First, some examples of successful wikis:
- Vodafone: Combine blogs and wikis. CEO blogs on the wiki. 65,000 employees.
- Leapfrog: Their finance department has a wiki. It’s designed to give new users a tour, plus it acts as a practical home page with useful things.
- SAP – SAP’s wiki (sdn.sap.com) has 800,000+ registered users using the wiki. Could conceivably be the largest corporate wiki.
- Deutsche Bahn – With over 270,000 employees (only 80,000 are online) they have 15,000 using the wiki. They reward contributions to knowledge management with the 42nd Marvin Awards, referring to the paranoid android Marvin from Douglas Adams’ “HItchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Marvin’s answer to every question is 42.
Skrocki’s three tips for successful blogs and wikis:
- Relax and TRUST your contributors – Give up control. People will use their common sense.
- Seed the site for success – That means create content. Engage power users in pilot, you’ll need pre-launch evangelism, communication, and stakeholder buy-in. Set up training tools such as instructional videos, 101 sessions for & by users, getting started content, and FAQs.
- Guide and nurture a self-sufficient community – Enable users to self-train, -police, -support, -evangelize, -organize, and most importantly -grow.
How to get people up and running on the wiki:
- Induction – Encourage people to write a personal profile
- Useful content that they need every day – e.g. Staff contact list
- Project management – Incorporate that into a repeatable cycle in your business
- Useful widgets – Add a task list or other tools that make it easy to use.
- Charts – Create useful dashboards with real-time data
- Internal blog – Share news and internal discourse
- Social organization – Encourage non-work use. You want people to become comfortable with the tool so let them use it that way.
- Permissions – Be as open as you can possibly be.
Recommended site: wikipatterns.com for advice on setting up and designing a wiki.
Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.
This post is cross-posted from the Enterprise 2.0 Blog.
