Read an interesting post today: Wiki Federation. It posits that organizations can effectively tie together separate wiki efforts from throughout the enterprise, and suggests this might be the best way to go.
I must respectfully disagree. We've only had our enterprise-wide wiki going for a few months and we have only deployed it to about 25% of staff, but it's already abundantly clear that it is and will pull people together in ways that have never happened for us before. Sorry, but there's no way a loose federation of wikis linked only by a search index is going to have these kind of effects.
The big difference is the social aspects of a true social media application, which our platform, Jive Clearspace has, versus the information emphasis that a federation of wikis would provide. Sure, you could search and find lots of things across the enterprise with a slick federation arrangement. But you're not going to have the tight integration that one platform offers. You're not going to have the familiarity that a single platform offers, as opposed to browsing the content found on some tool that you've never worked with. You simply will have all kinds of barriers that we don't with our single Enterprise 2.0 platform.
Of course, if you're not lucky enough to be able to deploy a single system across the enterprise, then a federation would be much better than entirely separate wikis in isolation. But if you can get everybody on the same system, I highly recommend it.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
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Hey Ted,
Yeah, I'd agree with you in that if an organization can move all its people to one instance it should. The awareness of what other people are doing is higher when everybody's in the same tool.
But my argument was that people will continue to use file shares and email systems to share information. An Enterprise 2.0 solution should acknowledge that knowledge is disparate and seek to unite it through enterprise search.
I suppose I envision it working like a mini Internet, where search engines provide access to virtually all accessible online content through a single UI and experience. An enterprise search engine will do the same across knowledge repositories on a corporate intranet.
But perhaps my approach is only relevant for larger companies (say 25,000+), and smaller companies will have better success consolidating to a single collaboration application.
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