The Wiki-Connected Workforce

by Stephen Foskett / Dec 19

The most valuable asset many companies have is their workforce. They attract the best knowledge workers with higher salaries, amenities, and flexible working conditions, and expect them to travel and excel in front of customers. But there is one more thing they expect – contribution to the group knowledge base so everyone can share.

The key to encourage sharing of knowledge is to remove barriers and demonstrate value. Most content management and collaboration systems are somewhat difficult to use and access, especially for remote users, so they end up with low levels of participation. Happily, the Internet has a demonstrated successful solution to the problem of group-created shared knowledge: The wiki!

Hello, Wiki

Wikipedia is the most familiar example, a global encyclopedia created and maintained entirely by volunteer users. Anyone viewing an article is free to edit it, and users can also add new pages. In this way, Wikipedia has been able to harness the vast knowledge of literally millions of people, each contributing a tiny amount to an encyclopedic whole.

Under the covers, the wiki software provides critical support without being intrusive. It maintains a revision history, so other visitors can track and even revert unwanted changes. It also simplifies the creation of links between articles so users don’t have to copy or type long addresses. The presentation of information is simplified as well, with easy markup replacing complex HTML code for formatting. Finally, the wiki software manages the organization of articles, creating an index, search, and categorization scheme as articles and links are added.

The Business End

When businesspeople think about wikis, they often jump to conclusions based on their experience with Wikipedia, however:

• They may assume that wikis have to be anonymous, even though most wikis encourage or require users to create named accounts.
• They could also jump to the conclusion that anything added to a business wiki would be open to the whole internet, though it is simple to control access to some or all of the pages of a wiki.
• Finally, they might think a wiki is not suitable for rich content like tables, multimedia files, and documents, even though Wikipedia’s companion Commons contains a massive multimedia database.

Business wikis do not have to be anything like Wikipedia or the other wikis scattered throughout the Internet. They normally include user accounts and passwords to control access, and may be placed behind VPNs on corporate intranets for added security. Some even disguise their wiki underpinnings, appearing to the casual user as standard web sites. And wikis manage documents and multimedia files as objects, maintaining revision histories and simplifying linking and updates just like a content management system.

Leverage Openness

Business wikis exist primarily to leverage the same effects that built Wikipedia: Low barriers to contribution, simple markup, easy access, solid content control, and flexible organization and linking. And the nature of a wiki suits knowledge-based workforces since there is always a single latest revision of the whole that incorporates all of the latest thinking.

Although the Mediawiki software used by Wikipedia is free and open source, there are many other wiki packages to choose from. Some are more suited to businesses, with links to corporate authentication and access control systems and integration with email and calendaring software. These are also offered as pay-as-you-go managed services with corporate support contracts and services to get the whole thing started.

Regardless of which software is used, a corporate wiki can yield tremendous benefits, enabling collaboration and contribution of knowledge.

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