The CX Blog

When wikis were first making headlines a while ago, I saw them as the golden promise: the answer to real knowledge transfer among far flung teams that most KM systems just couldn’t touch.  I still think wikis are amazing and offer that elusive collaborative networking possibility that’s missing in other applications.  In my mind, global frontline workers represent a potential brain drain–sure, you have super stars; sure, you have hidden caches of knowledge…but you also have high attrition and disengaged communities of users all over the planet.  The potential of a wiki to capture that information in language that made sense to frontline workers, and sharing the info in nearly real time–well, that would be the holy grail, right?  Sort of.

Elsua.net has a post today that comments on an article by Lucas McDonnell called “When Wikis Won’t Work: 5 Questions to Ask.”  Elsua adds to the 5 questions with 5 more of his own and those are the questions of interest to me since they get to the cultural issue of wiki adoption and use, and I think the cultural and infrastructural issues are key to success. In fact, I think the cultural and infrastructural issues are make-or-break and are the area where consulting could help the most.  Elsua’s 5 additional questions:

 1. Does my team / community have the necessary resources to support and facilitate the participation on the wiki?
2. Is the team / community capable of maintaining the wiki with a robust enough infrastructure?
3. Do team / community members trust each other enough to be able to update content on top of each other’s content without risking the quality of the knowledge shared?
4. Will the team / community provide the necessary education and training materials on how to effectively make use of the wiki for that specific purpose?
5. And, finally, the killer question: can the team / community perform that task at hand with the same quality and participation using other tools than a wiki? If so, why wouldn’t you use whichever of those tools?

It seems that since wikis are social-networked based, they sort of fall out of the traditional realm of top-down training and tilt towards facilitation.  The standard training team approach to new tools is to train and leave for the next training module.  Successfully implementing a wiki challenges this and  in fact requires much more coordinated effort and action between Training, for example, and the KM team.  The KM team, alternately, moves away from command-and-control knowledge distribution and becomes the uber-facilitator of knowledge sharing by moderating, mediating, highlighting, gardening, harvesting and sharing.

Of the last question, I wrote previously that there will be a day soon when we begin to see the real brilliance of wikis via mash-ups with other applications, such as existing process-oriented KB systems.  When we move away from either/or thinking, we’ll start to figure out how to combine, and wikis in combination with other applications is the real Holy Grail.