Enabling Employee
Communication
Wikis 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
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Background on intranets

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
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What is a wiki?

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/
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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)
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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
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