Worst Practices for Managing Wikis in Organizations
Following best practices is the royal road to success for a lot of today’s companies. The basic idea behind this approach to management is of course to learn from the best in the business and thus to avoid all the trouble of learning from your own mistakes. No need to get your hands dirty, right?
Unfortunately, the world is just a little more complex than that. Others’ best practices may well work for them, but there is no guarantee that they work for you. On the contrary, it is more likely that they don’t work for you at all. Reasons are easy to come by: Different products, different markets, different organizations, and so on, and so forth.
Instead of doing what others do best, try avoiding what others do worst. It is much more harder to follow best practices than to stay away from worst practices. With respect to managing wikis in organizations, then, here are the top 3 worst practices:
Employee Motivation. Managers keep asking me how they can properly motivate their employees to work with the wiki. Some already tried giving away incentives for edits (”Ten edits for a free cup of coffee, a thousand for a trip to Vegas!”), others make writing a part of employees’ workload (”A thousand edits by the end of the year and you’ll be fine!”). I always answer them with a counter question: Why do you have to motivate your employees at all? My point is to give your employees the benefit of the doubt. They don’t need extra motivation to work with the wiki as long as they see a benefit in using it.
The Purpose. What’s the purpose of the wiki? There is no more central question that managers have to answer before they go about telling someone from IT to install a wiki for all other employees (and not just the nerds in IT who had a perfectly running wiki for years). So, what is the purpose of your wiki? Say it in one sentence, even one word, I dare you. If you cannot answer in simple words such as “software documentation,” “to-do lists,” or “project notes,” then you may need to rethink you mission statement (you have a mission statement, don’t you?). The purpose of the wiki directly translates into the benefit that, ultimately, employees see in using the wiki.
Management. Yes, that’s right, management is the worst practice of them all. A wiki is a highly democratic medium. There is no easier way of killing it than imposing layers and layers of management upon it. Avoid managing your employees’ interest by making them “page patrons” or the like (so that each employee is responsible for some particular page or pages). If they are experts in some field, they will want to pass on their knowledge in one way or another. And if you can’t get some of them to put down what they know on a wiki page, well, maybe then a wiki is not the right way to do it (try making an interview-type podcast, most experts just love to talk about their work). Instead of putting up roles and rules, think of irritating a wiki by introducing a code of conduct (but be sure to put it in the wiki itself).
These are certainly the worst practices for managing wikis in organizations that we came across in our research. There are others, of course. And maybe even best practices, who knows.
September 10th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
What software package do you reccommend for setting up a Wiki at the office?
September 10th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Unfortunately, there is no general answer to this question. Several factors affect your decision.
For example, MediaWiki is a good choice: (a) Most of your employees will already know how to use it since its the engine Wikipedia uses, (b) it’s highly customizable with your own CSS and thousands of (free) plug-ins, and (c) it scales really well (obviously, if you consider Wikipedia). But if you are looking for third-party tech support or you just cannot allow open source (e.g., I know a major company that does not allow MySQL as a database, and that’s MediaWiki’s backend), you may be better of with something like Confluence.
A good place to compare wikis in terms of features is http://www.wikimatrix.org.
December 5th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Great post, thank you.
The main good/best practice in regard of motivation within Knowledge management and organizational learning is that executives and managers will move themselves towards the position of enablers: they should establish the spirit, the environment and the infrastructure for those who know - to meet, talk and share their stories.
Now, in regard to Wiki, it will only succeed if people within the organization will feel that they can formulate and create the encyclopedia values by themselves.
February 13th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Are best practices the enemyof innovation? Should we be talking about best thinking? Best practices help us overcome worst practices and complacency, up to the point that thinking stops and habits of mind take over.
How do we really broaden the concept of Invention to Innovation so that best thinking includes reflection, double and triple loop thinking?
Seems this can be directed way beyond Wiki discussion.
February 16th, 2009 at 10:30 am
@Dennis
Are best practices the enemy of innovation? Absolutely! Copying best practices leads to just one thing: a copy. And a copy is nothing new, certainly not an innovation.
Should we be talking about best thinking, then? I don’t really see the difference to best practices. Slappin’ on another label changes little to nothing. What matters most is thinking for oneself, thinking outside the box. I don’t mean to say that best practices are necessarily bad. Neither are worst practices. On the contrary, it’s essential that we look to others as well as to ourselves. What we need to realize is that while some things work for others, they may not work for us at all. Thus, it’s not best or worst thinking but simply THINKING.
How do we broaden the concepts of invention and innovation? First, don’t think of a lineary process from invention to innovation but as a recursive process with intermediary loops, setbacks, and steps forward. Wikis are a prime example. Most organizations quickly apply some kind of structure to their wikis that resembles something they’re familiar with, e.g., the departmental hierarchy in place or a project-based hyperlink structure. Over time, however, this structure adepts to the needs of its users. People link projects, put up new pages, and basically try something that hasn’t been done before — it’s natural curiosity. Fortunately, a wiki is a highly democratic medium that allows for dynamic change; in a very sense, it’s the complete opposite of other enterprise software such as SAP where not a single field in a GUI may change without the help of a third-party consultant.
Again, I agree, the question you’re posing are way beyond wikis. And we’re working on the answers
February 26th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
In an organisation it is possible to make people share best practise (of course if you can find them) - but how will you make people share their worst practises. ‘Please look at me and see how badly I failed’. I’m affraid that this won’t give much credit - eventhough it can be very beneficial to others. I think you need to have a good reputation to show your dirty laundry in public.