Nonetheless, I promised some time ago that I would keep you posted on the score with respect to Wiki Part Deux (Electric Boogaloo) . In short – so far, so good. Adoption, usage, and pervasiveness continue to steadily grow regardless of some rather daunting challenges like no SSO, no communication efforts, mandated account requests, and no integration with enterprise search. It’s all viral, all day and frankly it has been working surprisingly well. Like a virus. Errr…a friendly virus. A friendly virus that promotes transparency and recently added some hot new drag and drop capabilities. Yeah. That kind of virus.

As awareness increases, I have been fielding more and more questions on the difference between the wiki and (insert any big name document management platform here). The questions pertain to other internal systems or client systems. I (as well as a bunch of other much smarter people) have said some of this before, but thought it helpful to put it out there again.

Simply put, the wiki is not a new place to put content. It is a new way to create content. Think of the wiki as a replacement for Word or Email. Big name document management systems (in almost every organization I have seen) work like this: Open Word. Write something. Save it on your desktop. Upload it somewhere a few people can see it. Hopefully they find it. Hopefully they are the “right” people. Hopefully they download it. They make comments or changes. Hopefully they reupload. Hopefully you can reconcile the changes with everybody else’s. Rinse and repeat.

The wiki (in my organization) works like this -> Open the wiki. Write something. Save it. Everyone sees it. Some people comment or make changes. Actual (and rapid) collaboration ensues.

In my book the big difference between the two is a process improvement, not a location improvement. I don’t download. I don’t save attachments. I don’t worry about versions. I don’t send emails . I produce actual content.  My team and I are able to produce better content because we can work faster and with more brains at the table. Sure, there are great benefits in the knowledge management game, but at the end of the day it is about $ to me. Efficiency and leverage are the lifeblood of successful projects. Shifting how you think about producing the content, not where you think about putting the content will get you larger gains. It just so happens that the wiki is indeed a “place” of sorts at the end of the day, but the true value is in the process itself. This is why I see so many disappointed wiki users who do nothing but create pages and attach documents to them. There isn’t really a compelling improvement there. But when you change the process…now we’re cooking with gas.

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