Enabling Employee Communication: Wikis as Next Generation Intranets

Enabling Employee Communication Wikis as the next generation intranets Dr. Paul Welty SM

Outline • Background on intranets • What is a wiki? • How could a wiki be an intranet? • Discussion SM

Background on intranets

What is an intranet? • B2E - businesses communicating information to employees • Sometimes involves tools • Usually touches on email and other channels SM

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?) SM

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 SM

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 SM

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 SM

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? SM

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 SM

What is a wiki?

Definition • Group-editable Web site • Group-organizable Web site • Editing done through ordinary Web browser • Not HTML but “Wiki language” SM

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. SM

Demo • http://www.wikipedia.org/ • http://mediawiki.synaxisworks.com/ SM

How could a wiki be an intranet?

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) SM

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) SM

Benefits - Communication • Content-focused • Encourages decentralized content • Helps keep content fresh • History • Low barrier to changes • no need to obsess • no bottlenecks SM

Challenges • Integration with more functional tools • File sharing • Training • Cultural changes • With great power comes great responsibility • Syndication and non-www media SM

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Enabling Employee Communication: Wikis as Next Generation Intranets

by Paul Welty on Jun 12, 2009

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Enabling Employee Communication: Wikis as Next Generation Intranets — Webinar Transcript