A Wiki As An Open Point Of View On The World

A wiki lets people collectively transform a high amount of raw data into a useable and organized corpus of information. Most people have their own point of view about the world around us. Some of us even have more than one, depending on circumstances. But up to now there were no systematic way to transform those points of view into a coherent total.

Why Wikis Change This

A wiki gives a space for collaboration. Now you can get in one place all the content relevant to a given topic. With the help of Widgets you can now integrate content coming from various places and put it one one page. Our brain work by making associations between neurons. Now on a wiki we can all create relationships between bits of content and enrich them by linking them together easily, tagging them and retrieving their up-to-date content via RSS Syndication.

The Quest For Meaning

When searching on the internet, we are most of the time looking for an answer. Search engines are great, but sometimes do not turn up with the right answer. The same is true to a greater extent within companies: intranet are not meant to be easily searchable. The likes of Google Mini are starting to changing this, but even them cannot do more than automated search. The greatest benefit of a wiki in this context is that it lets people group relevant informaion together on one page (or set of pages).

Being Relevant

On a wiki, you can decide to give one page to every topic. This page will be enriched will all the content related to this topic. It will retrieve information from various different sources and be available at anytime, from anywhere. More than a reference sheet, the page will also be coherent: the content you will find on it is directly related to its title. Other potential meanings are listed and given pages on their own. How is that different from internet ? A wiki provides a place where information is classified following the needs of its very own users, where they can have a direct influence on every page. This is what 2-ways interaction means.

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

9 Corporate Wiki Starting Tips

There has been some buzz running lately on various tech blogs, regarding the best ways to get "social-enterprise" tools adopted faster and more easily. When it comes to wikis, various tips and tricks are suggested (amongst which my favourite is "if you don not want to end up disappointed, do not start") but there is room left for another list. At least this is what I will be arguing by doing in the following.

Get Things Off To A Good Start
  • Give your wiki a soul: this may look like an odd advice, particularly in a corporate setting, but it is maybe the most important one could ever give you. Think about any successful project you lead: which one did not include the strong sense of a shared purpose? Starting a wiki makes no exception.
  • Refer to the wiki: if you actually expect your people to go and use the wiki, make is as well known as possible. Encourage its adoption through an intensive internal referral campaign. Clearly stating that you will not read any attachment which has not been uploaded on a wiki page is a good idea to begin with.
  • Do not start from scrap: asking people to actually edit pages instead of only reading them is a concept weird enough to get to grasp with, do not add the burden of having to create your own pages (at least at the beginning). Think about putting most of the currently available material on the wiki and even start stubs for pages you feel like they deserve one.

Help Your People

  • Train them: there is some hype going around, which basically says "one should be able to use any piece of software without training". ... How many hours have you spent figuring out how to use less than 10% of MS Excel potential? A wiki is not complicated to use, but one should always remember this does not mean that everybody was born knowing what to do with one. In fact, most people were not.
  • Provide fast and relevant help: the one thing more annoying that a software that you cannot get to work properly is a software that you cannot get to work properly without knowing why. Whenever something does not go as well as expected, provide a resourceful help center. One that actually knows what your wiki software is, for example.
  • Listen to your users: elementary? Yes. Done? ... When it comes to a new technology adoption, providing more support than necessary is a necessity. Feedback is always useful: it tells you what actually does not not work and makes user feel they are listened to. Tip: if you decide to take action from these premises, it is even better.

Keep The Wiki Going

  • Go through the "start effect": after the buzz and enthusiasm following the launch of your corporate wiki, an after-shock state is likely to happen some way or another. This includes the 3-days period when no ones writes anything and the "what's new" page looks like your fridge. Do not be afraid to wait a little, things need time to get on the right track.
  • Hire a "wiki gardener": during the beginning, information will be added in places seemingly chosen randomly on the wiki. To sort things out and give coherence to the whole, consider assigning this task as a mission to somebody. It will make a huge difference if the wiki can be browsed easily.
  • Find out why this generic checklist did not work for your company: this would be my last reminder: every company is different, and implementing a coprporate wiki will hence trigger problems that are quite different too (depending on your enterprise culture, work habits and management staff...). Find out how a wiki could work for you, not how it ought to work for somebody else.

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

PS: For those of you who wonder why I stopped at 9 rather than going all the way to 10, it is mostly because I felt like 10 was too short to provide enough advice on the topic.

My Desktop Is My Wiki

Wondering about what my next post would be about, I realized that I was using my wiki in a way that could be worth testing by some other people. Basically, it is about gathering all my sources of information in one place, creating links between them and tagging pages, too. There is a blog to keep my customers up-to-date about market news. Add the fact that I can access my hosted wiki from anywhere and it looks pretty much like the perfect solution for a consultant.

Gathering Information

On of the most important aspects when you are an independant consultant is to be able to process loads of information coming from a great number of places and transform it into valuable pieces of advice. In order to do so, I use a RSS feed reader embedded in one of the pages of my wiki. My three other e-mail accounts have their pages, too and I can access them directly through wiki pages. Whenever I find something interesting, I can add it to an existing page or create a page specifically for it (eg, I have a specific page for every key corporate wiki company). Somewhat like a private Wikipedia...

Creating Relationships

Then the next step is all about creating relevant links between the various topics I may have encountered. I link people to the companies they work for, I assess trends on pages and link to the individuals that took a prominent part in them. I create tags to label all the pieces of information I will have to use in order to carry out one of my projects properly. The wiki backlinks feature always lets me know where I come from while the integrated search engine makes the retrieval of information obvious. Then, once information is stored, broken in manageable chunks and classified, I use the calendar to keep a track of what I have to do and whether I made progress.

Communicating With My Partners

While I am working on a given project, I open its dedicated space to my clients so that we can work collaboratively and exchange information easily through attached files. I discovered recently that I could display MS Office documents (such as PowerPoint Presentations) directly in wiki pages after saving them in html, and this is simply great. My clients do not have to open attached files any longer to find out what they deal with since their contents are displayed direclty on the page. I can export wiki pages in PDF too, and this is often useful to send bits of data in e-mails. Last but not least: I get a RSS feed from any tag I want, which is quite useful when it comes to following specific projects.

Basically, I can get all my information from wherever I am, provided an internet access is available. And guess what? I have not forgotten a file for a long time by now...

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Wikis And Contemporay Trends In Human Resources Development

About all of the world highly-developed countries boast a service-based economy. This means that western companies' most valuable asset is their skilled worforce. Investing in people's talent is maybe the soundest strategy ever - yet few enterprises are actually doing so. How could wikis help reverse the trend ?

The Wiki Way Of Doing Thing

The central tenet in the way wikis work can be summed-up in one word: collaboration. Wikis encourage people's participation through their mechanism of easy page edition. They foster collective creativity by letting people create a coherent result from many small, individual additions. By the very way they work, using wikis in your company is a testimonial to your staff that you believe in their potential.

Empowering People

One of the most tricky issues enterprises are faced with is the matter of life-long learning. How do you get your staff to keep itself up-to-date and aware of a constantly-moving business environment ? A wiki offers an elegant solution to this question : first, it provides a place where information that would have otherwise disappeared can be stored. Working in a Wikipedia-like manner, inside your company, a wiki can offer a base for shared knowledge amongst workers. Second, a wiki is user-enriched; from this follows that all the little bits of knowledge that are spread amongst employees can at last find a place to be expressed. More information available for a responsabilized staff: this is what wikis can do.

Providing Flexibility And Freedom

Another important evolution taking place inside the corporate world is the shift towards an increased place given to part-time and remote working. Wikis provide a useful and easy to use tool when it comes to coordinating the work of people working from different places, at different times. By providing a durable place where information can be added and structured, a wiki allow your company to provide its staff with more opportunities. Let them work when it is easier for thel to and see the global productivity of your company boosted.

What should you remember ? It is, basically
That modern HR trends are going through wiki.

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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

A Wiki To Get Customer Feedback

Ever dreamt of a place where the people who buy your products could tell you what they actually think about them ? A place that would help you increase customer satisfaction, enlighten consumer needs and give the market what it is looking for ?

How could that work ?

The rationale behind such a wiki goes as follow : first, a wiki is a place where people can easily share and discuss information. What's more, people are always lookig for a place where they could tell brands what they think about what they are doing - and find out what others say, too. A wiki would provide your brand with an interactive place of reference for customers looking for more than usual corporate websites.

Ever thought a FAQ was not enough ?

Most users of your products do not know that they could use it for much more than what they currently do. Just think about iTunes : how many interesting features are you not using ? A wiki would let you create an interactive FAQ wher people could share tips about what can be done with your products, and give your company more space to build clever FAQ and how-to. The era of the notice silent about the very point you are wondering about just vanished.

Collaborative Product Design

The last part of this evolution could take the form of a wiki where engineers could suggest new products and instantly get feedback from potential clients. Designing specifications with the help of actual end-users : what better way to keep in touch with the market requirements ? Your customers could be your greatest fans, just let them express themselves !


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© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC