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InformationWeek >  How To Use Wikis For Business

Content management packages will likely be around for the foreseeable future, but they will be under increasing pressure from wikis. As is evidenced by the enterprise wikis currently on the market, content management is likely to hybridize with the wiki into a new, more robust application that combines the strengths of both tools. Watch for wikis or wiki hybrids to appear in your workplace before long. Link >>

InformationWeek has an article on the business use of Wikis - and the quote above is the concluding paragraph.

I’ve had very little success with Wikis - for business use and otherwise, and I’m wondering if anyone has had better luck.

The challenges, as I saw them, were:

- Getting people out of email for project management.  For *any* other kid of PM tool - blog, wiki, eRoom, whatever.  I’ve worked with smart, savvy project managers who claimed to be “too busy” to go check a project blog for new posts (and couldn’t be convinced to use an RSS reader), yet had the time to assemble issues lists into an Excel spreadsheet that were then emailed to project participants.  And then had the time to aggregate all the individual responses back into the master doc, and re-send that out.  Over and over.

- Getting people to understand the basic “anyone can edit the pages” nature of a wiki.  I sensed that people seemed to want web pages to have an owner, either that or they didn’t want the responsibility of adding or changing the content. 

What about you - any success stories using a wiki?  Any ideas for getting past these issues?

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

  1. sparky on August 29, 2005

    No success stories here.

    You know my story.

    Seems that people want all the information they have to offer to be made available on a webpage, yet when you give them a method to make that possible they won’t do it.  They want you, the owner, to do the assembling for them.

  2. Dave J. on August 29, 2005

    Like most content, there is a critical mass of usefulness that then makes the site essential, only then the site gains a life of its own.

    I’ve often thought a wiki would be the ultimate Intranet. Thanks for the warning.

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