I love wikis. I love the concept of wikis. I love the potential for enterprise wikis on the corporate intranet.

However, wikis are not reinventing the intranet. In fact, very few organizations have an enterprise wiki on the intranet. Though as I alluded to last week in Wiki versus content management the wiki is growing in popularity.

Shiv Singh adds some much needed perspective to the wiki hype in his recent column The Truth about Enterprise Wikis:

Every second day I come across someone waxing profusely about enterprise wikis and how they're going to change the way knowledge workers interact. I believe in enterprise wikis and I really like wikipedia too. But that doesn't mean I feel every Fortune 500 needs an enterprise wiki. There are some important truths about enterprise wikis that get ignored often.

The first is that not every knowledge worker wants to collaborate. Putting an edit button on a page doesn't mean your knowledge workers are going to jump at the opportunity to share their thoughts for free. Enterprise wikis succeed in companies that truly reward collaboration. There aren't many companies like that.

Secondly, enterprise wikis only work when people feel secure in editing someone else's work. I can't imagine many knowledge workers editing their bosses work especially if everyone else is going to see the edits. It just doesn't happen that frequently. Sure if they're collaborating on a document and only the two of them have access to the page then maybe. But certainly not otherwise. Before encouraging your knowledge workers to use a wiki, make sure you have a trusted, secure office culture first.

More on The Truth about Enterprise Wikis.

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“In today’s market in which survival depends on retaining talent and delivering high levels of customer satisfaction, no organization can afford to fail at understanding how to communicate effectively to its employees,” says writes Carm Porco, VP, Prescient Digital Media, in his recent article, Tuning in the right employee communication channel.

“If those market imperatives weren’t enough, one would think that the broadest array of communication channels in human history would provide a sufficient incentive for organizations to take this topic seriously.”

Understanding what the employee wants and needs (and there’s a key difference between the two) is imperative for intranet success. If you don’t intimately understand – both quantitatively and qualitatively – what your intranet users expect then you might as well just have a one-way newsletter.

Here’s some stats cited by Carm…

• An estimated 22 million workers are “actively disengaged” or extremely negative in their workplace, resulting in a $300 billion cost to the U.S. economy annually.
• A study found that negative employees can scare off every customer they speak with — for good.
• The magic ratio: 5 positive interactions for every 1 negative interaction (Source: Donald O Clifton: How full is your Bucket?”).
• A 2004 IABC Survey states “Better employee communication leads to increased employee morale, loyalty, faith in management and productivity.