Wikis are indeed a powerful collaboration tool for employees. However, like any tool that requires participation from people, the success of an employee wiki requires highly engaged and participatory individuals. In other words, a successful wiki has less to do with technology, and more to do with communications and change management.
Janssen-Cilag recently replaced their intranet with a wiki. The Australian pharmaceutical subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson originally had a static HTML intranet that was delivering little value. The original intranet (launched in 2001) was static, delivering limited value, and was plagued by many of the common problems associated with many young intranets.
“While some areas were lovingly maintained to a high standard, large sections of content were out of date,” writes Janssen-Cilag CIO Nathan Wallace in his blog case study Our Intranet, the Wiki: Case Study of a Wiki changing an Enterprise. “There was no search capability. Trust in the information was very low. News was distributed via email, not the web.”
Janssen-Cilag’s problems are very typical problems that most organizations can relate to. However, Wallace moved his company in a very non-typical direction by selecting a wiki platform to power their home page intranet. With a budget of only $11,000, Wallace directed the implementation of a new intranet, JCintra, in two weeks using a product called Confluence. Confluence was chosen over other products such as MediaWiki, Twiki and FlexWiki for its “support for a hierarchy of pages, strong attachment capabilities, news features, LDAP integration, high quality search and a decent rich text editor.”
In his case study, Wallace highlights some of the implementation priorities and decisions:
· Integration with LDAP and use of NTLM for automatic single sign on is essential. We even hacked someone's starting point and open sourced our improved version.
· Rich text editing must be available and as Word-like as possible.
· Users like hierarchy and structure, the Wiki should not feel disorganised or completely free-form. (Confluence supports this with an exact page hierarchy capability.)
· Sacrifice power and flexibility for simplicity. For example, our page design is fixed into a title, alphabetical list of subpages, page content, alphabetical list of attachments. While it would be nice to be able to change this at times, or order the attachments, or change the look and feel; it's far more important that everyone can contribute and clearly understands how things work.
· Remove as many unnecessary features as possible. For example, labels are a great idea, but we already have hierarchy and most users don't really know what labels are.
While most organizations would worry about the risk of employees being able to change and edit all content, this risk rarely materializes as reality. The Jannsen-Cilag intranet records a complete history of all changes and additions to all content so mistakes can be quickly corrected. This history workflow also keeps employees, who cannot contribute anonymous content, accountable for their contributions.
In the first three months, despite an employee population of only 300 people, 111 people had contributed more than 5,000 changes to the intranet.
“The adoption of JCintra has been remarkable,” says Wallace. “Our contributions per month have continued to grow since launch. People are engaging and collaborating more with time, they are not losing steam as you might expect.”
“People are engaging and collaborating more with time, they are not losing steam as you might expect. To drive adoption, we’ve primarily focused on owning the flow of new information. Early on, we established a policy that all announcements must be on JCintra. When necessary, they may be sent via email in addition to posting as news on the Intranet.
While I believe a wiki-based intranet has its time and place and will not work in all organizations, particularly larger ones where application integration and user personalization are key drivers, Wallace and team have demonstrated a wiki-based intranet can be very successful in the right culture.
“In a culture full of all the typical trust, transparency, workload and security concerns common to big companies; the simplicity of this system and its content ownership model cut through,” adds Wallace. “Problems of driving collaboration and content updates remain, but they are exposed as the cultural and people problems at their heart since the technical and workload "excuses" have been stripped away.”
(Thanks to Bill Ives at Enterprise 2.0.)
RELATED
Also read how Intrawest Placemaking implemented a similar wiki intranet in a slightly larger organization. See Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking.
BOOKMARK THIS:
Digg this 
Post to del.icio.us 
Post to Slashdot 
reddit
