Connecting the dots ...
If you are/were involved in using a wiki in a business environment and can spare 10 minutes, you may be interested in taking this survey run by Penny Edwards, an MBA student in the UK. You’ll be able to see the current stats upon concluding the survey.
No, this is not an anti-wiki pitch, that would be highly unlikely coming from me. But I am continually amazed how we tend to focus on features while missing the people factor. Knowledge Management is a prime example. KM projects typically do not fail due to software issues, but for human reasons: lack of input, or GIGO. Yet here’s an excerpt from a white paper by enterprise wiki vendor MindTouch::
“Wikis provide a flexible alternative to the rigidity of conventional
knowledge management software.
Why wikis work for knowledge management
Based on the features described above, wikis are a powerful replacement for conventional
knowledge management software, because they make knowledge easier to
capture, find and consume:
a. Capturing information: The information is there. Somewhere. Maybe on
a PC, maybe in a file attached to an email, maybe in someone’s head
undocumented. With a wiki, all documents are stored in one central
repository, and files are uploaded rather than attached to emails. Therefore
information is more likely to be captured, stored and made available for reuse.
b. Finding information: When a user has to search a network file server,
he or she must know exactly where to look. A wiki lets a user search
contextually. In addition, because the structure is not required to be linear—
as with KM software—cross-linking of pages helps users not only find
information, but find relevant information.
c. Consuming information: In addition to finding information more easily with
a wiki, a user finds that information in context, meaning the information
is in a location that gives the user some background and perspective relative
to the data. That enables the user to more quickly comprehend the meaning,
significance and relevance of that piece of information. “
All of the above is true – yet it misses the Big Picture. The real story is not about a better tool, but being able to work differently. When wikis are truly embraced in the enterprise, they don’t just make KM easier; they put it out of it’s misery. Yes, that’s right, the wiki is the end of Knowledge Management as we know it: the after-the-fact collection, organization and redistribution of knowledge objects.
The wiki becomes the primary platform to conduct work, the fabric of everyday business, where people create, collaborate, and in the process capture information. While not a Knowledge Management tool, the wiki resolves the KM-problem as a by-product.
Update (6/15/08): Now we have pretty good terms to describe the above, instead of my clumsy explanation. See the discussion on In-the-Flow and Above-the-Flow wikis by Michael Idinopulos and Ross Mayfield.
Ross Mayfield talks about similar ideas in Manage Knowledgement (MK):
“Turns out, users resisted and the algorithms didn’t match reality. With MK, through blogs and wikis, the principle activity is sharing, driven by social incentives. Contribution is simple and unstructured, isn’t a side activity and there is permission to participate. Intelligence is provided by participants, both through the act of sharing and simply leaving behind breadcrumbs of attention.”
Update (5/1): What Happened to Knowledge Management? – by Stewart Mader
I’ve written about how wikis can become *the* Intranet, that is not only easy to access but easy to edit by everyone, in the organization. Instead of a one-way communication channel for Management to talk (down) to employees, the wiki becomes a living, breathing, participatory communication platform.
Now there’s a new case study of how a a customer of Atlassian’s Confluence wiki is using it for customer communication, by building their entire Extranet on Confluence.
The wiki has become the Intranet+Extranet.
Traditional web sites are so 20th Century – Blogs and Wikis bring them to life, and they are easier to set up. Perhaps not surprisingly, a Web 2.0-focused VC, Union Square Ventures was one of the first to replace their entire Web site with a blog – read the rationale of the switch. Corporate web sites soon followed suit, just look at Architel and Return Path as examples. Now, for some shameless self-promotion, my earlier tips on the subject: Blogs To Replace Personal Web sites.
In Wikis are the Instant Intranet I also talked about how companies can set up a living-breathing Intranet, one that people can actually use, not just passively read by deploying a wiki: ” in the large corporate environment a wiki can be a lively collaborative addition to the Intranet (see the wiki effect by Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield), but for smaller, nimble, less hierarchical business a wiki is The Intranet.” (note: I am not just speculating on this: been there, done that in my prior life).
Now Sydney-based Customware raised the bar:
The entire web site (not only the Intranet, but the customer-facing web) is built on a wiki – Confluence by Atlassian. (hat tip: Mike Cannon-Brookes)
Update (9/28): The Atlassian Blog points to several other wiki-powered sites that look-and-feel like traditional websites.
Update (9/22): Just as soon as I posted this article, I saw this pic on Rod Boothby’s blog:
Itensil, short for “Information Utensils” builds “a self-service technology that we’re calling Team Wikiflow that captures collective intelligence and delivers it as reusable team processes.”
I have to admit I haven’t heard of Itensil – it will be exciting to meet them, as well as Atlassian, Socialtext, Zoho, ConnectBeam, EchoSign and many other companies in the collaboration space at the Office 2.0 Conference.
Update (4/12/07): Here’s a list of corporate websites powered by CustomerVision’s BizWiki.
Can you possibly get a patent on tax-avoidance advice? Apparently yes, says Jeremy Kahn at Fortune:
“In recent years, the Patent Office has begun granting patents to people who claim to have invented novel ways of avoiding taxes.
To tax shelter touts, the patents are a potentially deceptive new marketing tool. After all, if something is patented, it sounds as if it is government-approved. But just because something is patented doesn’t mean it’s legal.”
“Earlier this year, a Florida company called Wealth Transfer Group filed suit against John Rowe, the executive chairman of Aetna, alleging he infringed on the patent it holds for a tax savings technique involving the transfer of stock options to a certain type of trust because he used a similar technique without paying Wealth Transfer a licensing fee.”
This is utter nonsense and the consequences are dire. Tax advice as not that far from any other type of legal advice, and this goes directly against the logic of Case Law.
“If you can patent an interpretation of the tax law, why not patent anyone’s legal advice?” asks Carol Harrington, a lawyer with the firm McDermott Will & Emery in Chicago. “Then you could say people being prosecuted for murder can’t use a certain defense without paying a licensing fee.”
A practical concern is the Patent Office’s ability to make the right decisions: it has very few examiners with deep knowledge of tax law, especially of “creative technics” – just like it feels outdated in technology, software issues. Add to this the explosion in the number of patent applications “leaving examiners only 20 hours on average to comb through a complex application, research past inventions, and decide whether a patent should be granted.”
An unlikely alliance of Government and the largest Tech Corporations may soon bring the power of social computing to deal with this epidemic of shoddy patents. New York Law School professor Beth Noveck came up with the idea of letting outside peer reviewers participate in the patent examination / review process in a Wikipedia-like system.
The professor is getting technical help from IBM, and the Patent Office expects to run a pilot in 2007 on a few hundred patents applications made available by IBM, HP and Microsoft.
Another example of wikis put to good use. 
Tags: patents, frivolous+patents, patent+office, uspto, tax+law, tax+loopholes, tax+avoidance, legal+advice, case+law, precedent+law, patent+abuse, wikis, wiki, wikipedia, social+computing, patent+review, patent+examiners
You Know Wikis Have Arrived When …. they become the feature post in your regular junk mail – this time from an Executive Recruiter firm:
What in the World is a “Wiki”?
If you don’t know what a Wiki is, you probably should.
The term “Wiki” refers to both a collaborative site on the web or your company’s intranet/extranet and the software that runs the Wiki.
A wiki is a website designed for collaboration. Unlike a traditional website where pages can only be read, in a wiki everyone can edit, update and append pages with new information, all without knowing HTML, simply by using a MS Word type interface.
Wikis are the latest, greatest tool for group collaboration, project teams, document editing, etc. And, best of all, they are easy to use, affordable, and extremely flexible.
The easiest way to learn more is to click on the link at the end of this section of the newsletter and try it for yourself!
What can you do with a wiki?
Whether you’re at work or at home, you can access and use a wiki. The wiki allows free-form collaboration, but most wiki software providers and hosts also offer structured applications that allow you all kinds of very helpful functionality.
Here are some of the things that can be done (depending on whose software you use and what applications may be available:
A wiki can be hosted on your company servers or there are a number of hosted versions available. There are a number of suppliers, each touting advantages over their competitors, of course.
One important aspect of a wiki — it is highly cost- effective and versions/solutions range from those for the smallest teams on the most limited budgets scaling up to full enterprise versions.
If you are unfamiliar with this explosive growth phenomenon, you may want to take a look for yourself. [Company name] has found one supplier offering free trials. It’s pretty neat stuff and has become indispensable in our own operations. Click the link below for a free trial.
This is not a [Company name] product but we have used the free trial ourselves and had no problems, no hassles, and no sales calls. It just takes 30 seconds or so to sign up.
Confluence and Socialtext are both Enterprise Wiki’s , robust, well-supported, targeting corporate customers.
JotSpot is more geared towards smaller businesses and consumers and in fact it’s a mix of a wiki plus a few basic applications.
Central Desktop is a “wiki without the wiki”, more of a full-featured collaboration platform with calendar, task, project ..etc features.
WetPaint blurs the line between wiki, blog and discussion group, providing an amazingly easy to use interface, but it’s currently at beta stage.
The above list is by far not complete, it’s just a few of the top of my head – feel free to contribute in the comments section.
(Updated)
Wikis and blogs -social software in general – were the “latent” subject at Software 2006, popping up at several sessions throughout the conference.
In his opening keynote Ray Lane talked about the inter-personal enterprise: collaboration, increased participation through friendlier, better user experience; the user as an individual, “consumer” has to like the software, then will use it, and usage spreads within the company: a pull process, rather than push – the traditional enterprise sales model. This is exactly the model wikis are “sold”, as we discussed earlier. Ray specifically mentioned how useful they found using a wiki at Kleiner Perkins.
Then during the last panel, Toby Redshaw, CIO of Motorola talked about how he installed wikis and blogs: turned it on, decidedly not telling anyone “above” or laterally until it was too late for anyone worried about “control” to interfere. People discovered the new tools, started to use them, and before he knew there were 1900 blogs and 2000 wikis used in Motorola. Grassroots action at it’s best, just like Ray explained. Joe (JotSpot) and Ross (SocialText) could not have asked for a better plug of wikis, just minutes prior to their software showcase.
On the way from this session to the showcase room Ross was showing me his latest baby, Miki, the mobile wiki. One of the conference attendees (Director at a major organization) walked alongside us, overheard the conversation, and jumped in: “where can I get it?” Wow, I think Ross just closed a 30–second sale
There is something funny about these product names, though. Ross just found out that Miki in Irish slang means male genitalia… hm… close .. here’s the Urban Dictionary definition. Never mind, it didn’t hurt Jobby, won’t hurt Miki either. Incidentally, Miki in Hungarian is nickname form for Nicholas, and in Japanese a female name meaning “flower stalk.” Not bad.
The Miki launch was the last announcement of the day, then we headed off for some “Open Source” cocktails and appetizers.
Related posts – Miki seems to enjoy a warm welcome:
Update (4/8): It was fun to see JotSpot and SocialText together – would have been even more fun to see the third (and by the number of enterprise customers definitely not last) product: Confluence by Atlassian.
The 43 Wiki prank was just that: a joke and social experiment. Everyone could have their 5 (?) minutes of fame.
33 Wikis, on the other hand is a series worth keeping an eye on: it will be a 33–day series featuring best practices in wiki-based collaboration. You can nominate your own wiki-project in the comments area. (hat tip: Ross Mayfield)
Unrelated, but should anyone wonder, 23 is a photo-sharing service, a’la Flickr, and 23half is a new information discovery service for mobile phones. 
I think I’ll leave 13 alone, but perhaps it’s time to register 53 and 53quarter...
Update (3/27): And now, thanks to Robert Scoble, we know what 72 Degrees are. 
Tags: wiki, wikis, 33 wikis, 43 wiki, 23half, humor, collaboration, productivity
(Updated)
Since I received a few questions after my post: 43 Wiki Prank and the Whiteboard Test, I though I should add a bit of clarification. The underlying thought in that article was to pick the right tool for the right situation, and the whiteboard-test is just one trick to differentiate when Wiki’s are helpful vs. Forum, Blog ..etc software. It’s by far not the only situation when a wiki is invaluable.
Another example is setting up a living, breathing Intranet, one that people can actually use. Anybody who works in large corporations probably thinks of the IntraNet as a one-way communication channel for Management to talk (down) to employees. Getting your own content in? Forget it! Even when I was VP in a mid-sized organization and did not have wait for approval, I still had to talk to the IT Director, wait for him to fit it in his team’s schedule, then tell him what was wrong when my content finally showed up.
It does not have to be this way! Companies “own” (well, at least part of the day) the intellectual capacity of their employees, so why not put it to work? Even in the large corporate environment a wiki can be a lively collaborative addition to the Intranet (see the wiki effect by Ross), but for smaller, nimble, less hierarchical business a wiki is The Intranet.
At a much smaller organization I wanted to introduce a wiki for collaboration, for all the reasons explained in the video below. The company was a bit more old-fashioned, not exactly the early-adopter type. I expected some resistance against something with a geeky-funny name like wiki… so I simply announced we’ll be creating an editable Intranet. People started to use it from day 1, and few cared that the thingie behind is called a wiki.
David Terrar describes a somewhat similar story here.
Finally, the excellent video by JotSpot Founder Joe Kraus.
Other related posts:
Update (4/9): A really good guide to wikis by David Terrar.
Update (10/22): Here’s a case study of Confluence, the leading enterprise wiki being used as the ExtraNet.
Update (4/9/07): Read/WriteWeb on The Age of Instant Intranets.
Update (9/20/08): A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Intranet
It was 2006, the first Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and I just met Jeffrey Walker, President of Atlassian. I had followed the company for a while (OK, I admit, had been a fan), met Mike, but this was the first time with Jeffrey, so we took our box lunch to a cozy little place away from the crowd and started to chat. Within minutes a VC Partner joined us, and so the usual “what are you doing” conversation started. Well, it wasn’t a conversation: Jeffrey talked, the VC listened. And in 5 minutes he was ready pull out the checkbook (sort of), when Jeffrey dropped the bomb:
We’re actually not seeking funding. We’re fully funded. By customer revenues.
Seeing the VC’s face was priceless. After all, the cliche for startup success was to take funding. Which Atlassian did – 4 years later. But they do nothing by halves. $60 million or nothing! 🙂 But I am running ahead. Back to the early days.
I got to know Atlassian as the Wiki Company – having compared the few early business wikis, I came to the Conclusion that Confluence was the most robust, complete one. I’m probably not the most pleasant reviewer when I don’t like what I see – but I could simply not find anything to criticize with Confluence – it became the de facto industry standard for others to follow. That said Atlassian is /was about more then Confluence: their roots are in supporting developers, having started with a powerful bug tracker Jira, and growing to eight (?) products 
organically and through acquisitions. Not being a techie, I don’t even understand most of these products – so the root cause of my infatuation with Atlassian was really their business model.
There is nothing wrong with taking VC Funding, but risking everything to your last penny is what Entrepreneurship was originally all about, so it is simply refreshing to see a company to have made it solely on bootstrapping, beating the odds. Add to it great software that’s easy to buy, learn, use, sprinkle it with a good dose of transparency and great service, and you get a startup worth admiring. I’ve had lots of fun covering their early success and also learned a lot watching them:
Oh, and they gave me some of my funnier titles:
Sell Software – Ship T-Shirts (how come I don’t have them?)…’cause they like having fun, and I guess it’s contageous. But amidst all that fun they can sometimes be dangerous:-)
I tried to help them fill The Dream Job (no, I wanted that job:-)), help with their charitable promotion – hey, even put my http://www.cloudave.com/link/helping-atlassian-stimulus-package-towards-the-finish-line“>money where my mouth was. Then I had to write the most difficult post in my life, saying goodbye to Jeffrey, Atlassian President, musician, amazing person and fellow Enterprise Irregular.
And today they taught me another lesson: don’t ever sit on a story. It expires. My unwritten story that I’ve been contemplating for a while was about two bootstrapped startups, both in software, amazingly successful that have sailed into IPO zone almost unnoticed. The second one is Zoho, which I consider to be approaching IPO-readiness, but I seriously doubt they would chose to go that way. But Zoho is our Sponsor, talking too much about them would look like ***ing up, so I’ll stop here. The day will come. But today is Atlassian’s day.
Why would a company that has profitably grown for 8 years need funding now? They want to grow more agressively, both in terms of geography and product coverage. That means acquisitions. They want to accelerate growth to above $100M revenue, which is what’s considered “IPO ready” nowadays.
But what drove me to the conclusion they were on the IPO-track even before the funding was deep in their culture.
Atlassian is always hiring, yet it’s difficult to get in. They are picky. It’s a “work-hard-play-hard” culture. Employees are well paid and the company spends lavishly on team fun. No wonder their revenue per employee ratio is high. But the team lives in Sydney and San Francisco, where there is an expectation that after a few years in a red-hot startup you get rich… The Founders probably no longer live frugally, but how to share the wealth with all employees without an exit? Funding accelerates the path to exit and my even bring interim liquidity critical to keep the team around. I agree with Ben in that respect.
$60 million is a lot of money, in fact Accel Partners claim it is the largest investment they’ve ever made in the software business. But there’s a whole world of difference in picking it up as a mature, profitable company or a fledgling startup. Some of Atlassian’s competitors picked up a third of this amount at early stages and probably had to give up three times as much equity as Atlassian did. Bootstrapping has paid off, after all.
Oh, about that $60M T-shirt – you really have to read it over @ Atlassian. After all, this is a SFW blog:-)
Update: I’m speechless. What’s this? Sour grapes?
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)
Publisher / Editor of CloudAve and Enterprise Irregulars.
I do most of my business blogging there, with occasional asides here. More...
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