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Enabling Employee CommunicationWikis as the next generation intranets

Dr. Paul Welty

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Outline

• Background on intranets

• What is a wiki?

• How could a wiki be an intranet?

• Discussion

Background on intranets

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What is an intranet?

• B2E - businesses communicating information to employees

• Sometimes involves tools

• Usually touches on email and other channels

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First-generation intranet

• Passive display of commonly-needed information

• Starts replacing offline materials

• Often file-centric

• Often accompanied by excessive, poorly-targeted emails

• Usually fragmented through many sites

• Platform: HTML pages managed individually

• Problems: freshness, relevance, critical mass (why go online at all?)

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Second-generation intranet

• Actively supplying employees with data they need

• Often feature more benefits information

• Personalization

• More expensive platforms, usually homegrown

• Problems: more and more IT resources are required, performance, adoption, rogue sites as tools spread

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Third-generation intranet

• Features employee work tools

• Centralize: final consolidation of rogue sites

• Unified look-and-feel

• Very expensive platforms, usually third-party

• Projects characterized by massively top-down thinking

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Third-generation intranet problems

• Deep thinking about information hierarchy is expensive, time-consuming, and almost never right

• Platforms are very difficult to implement

• Adoption

• Maintenance

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Fourth-generation intranet

• E2E - Employee interaction

• Decentralized content

• Roughly parallels CGM in public world

• Technology has finally outpaced our thinking about the intranet

• Needs a platform

• The question is: what will be the platform?

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Wikis - the argument

• Current technological and strategic focus should be abandoned as too complex and too expensive

• Let’s just admit there is no perfect navigation

• Lower-tech, more open, collaborative tools are required to support what’s going on

• Wikis are a good choice for platform

• they are flexible enough for what we want

• they don’t require expensive up-front investments

What is a wiki?

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Definition

• Group-editable Web site

• Group-organizable Web site

• Editing done through ordinary Web browser

• Not HTML but “Wiki language”

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History

• Using Apple’s HyperCard software as inspiration, Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and it went live in 1995.

• “Wiki” is a Hawaiian-language word for “fast”

• Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition.

• As of September 2007, Wikipedia had approximately 8.29 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.41 billion words for all Wikipedias.

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Demo

• http://www.wikipedia.org/

• http://mediawiki.synaxisworks.com/

How could a wiki be an intranet?

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Model

• Ideal for situations when accurate, up-to-date information needs to be available

• Many-to-many

• Decentralized

• Collaborative

• Empowering

• Relax! It’s never finished (and doesn’t need to be)

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Benefits - Implementation

• Doesn’t need a lot of design, technology, or information architecture

• Can run on most servers

• Easy and quick to install

• Low-impact on current environment

• Free software (and bundles)

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Benefits - Communication

• Content-focused

• Encourages decentralized content

• Helps keep content fresh

• History

• Low barrier to changes

• no need to obsess

• no bottlenecks

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Challenges

• Integration with more functional tools

• File sharing

• Training

• Cultural changes

• With great power comes great responsibility

• Syndication and non-www media