Three myths of enterprise wiki deployment

A Denmark-based analyst with research firm J. Boye said she's encountered an organization that, after implementing an enterprise-wide employee wiki, realized it didn't exactly have the right culture to bring it to life.

Discussions prior to the site launch debated whether employees should contribute anonymously or through profiles, and whether those profiles should include user photos, recounted Dorthe Jespersen. Ultimately, employees were allowed to contribute through profiles with pictures, she said, "but [the organization] had a conservative culture so no one actually wanted to make visible what they were working on right now."

Jespersen said the employees' concerns varied anywhere from harboring concerns around writing about work that perhaps wouldn't be considered "real" work, or about work that they weren't supposed to be doing at the time, or even having fears of making spelling errors.

"Even small things, as how you decide to set up the design... that can actually have an effect on adoption," she said.

With the growing popularity of enterprise 2.0, many organizations are increasingly willing to grant employees a common platform upon which to collaborate and contribute and share ideas. Wikis are often touted as such a platform that is easily launched and to which employees will flock to contribute ideas, but Jespersen said they can prove difficult to get off the ground if not done properly.

One issue is the hype surrounding wikis or the blind faith with which they are approached, said Jespersen. "People often look to Wikipedia as a free form where everyone is contributing, and why could we not do the same with our organization?," she said, having observed wikis entering the scene to compensate for an intranet that has fallen to the wayside. But, she said, technology alone won't resolve that issue.

Jespersen lists three myths surrounding wiki implementation that might make some organizations rethink the expectations they've built around their platform:

Myth One: Wikis will motivate employees to contribute content.

It won't happen automatically that employees will freely contribute. Jespersen describes the "Empty wiki syndrome," or when a wiki is deployed without a clear purpose or is too general in its focus, resulting in a site with almost no activity.

It helps, said Jespersen, to appoint someone to manage the wiki, ensure there is structure like guidelines and a basic information architecture, and that it is launched with content already posted because "it's very hard to just react to this empty space for the user."

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