How one old dog learned a new trick

Sometimes you just walk into a special situation that brings the human face of an IT project into bold relief. That happened to me yesterday. When I walked over to a colleague's desk to ask about something completely unrelated to the wiki, I noticed something interesting.

On her PC she had an open wiki text editor with some text typed in it. But she was working on something else. Since she's never posted anything on the wiki, I was intrigued.

"Ready to post something?" I asked her.

"I'm not sure," she replied.

"Why not?"

She just looked at me for a few seconds.

"Don't worry about posting something. All ideas are welcome."

"I'm not sure," she replied.

"Just go for it. With thousands of people on the wiki, you never know where your idea might go."

She thought for another second, turned to her computer, and hit Send.

"Good for you," I said.

She was visibly relieved. Less than 5 minutes later, she had her first reply -- from her manager, no less. He thought her idea had legs. Without the wiki, I wonder if it would ever have seen the light of day.

Score one for the wiki. Score two for the power of human relationships.

Teaching an old wiki new tricks

Last week I did a wiki training session that included one of the senior managers in our company. As I walked him and the others through the options for doing work on the wiki, he asked me if we could use the wiki to do customer focus groups. Yes, customer focus groups.

Now, our wiki is primarily intended as a resource for internal use only, but when Ted and I considered this proposal, we found a way to make it happen using a 'sandboxed' instance of the wiki. In the end, we hope that this customer-facing wiki will not only save time by avoiding countless conference calls with clients, but that it will become a place where we can educate thought leaders in the industry about all of our other social media activities. And that's just for starters.

This is exciting stuff, and it goes to show that the old saying is true: You can teach an old wiki new tricks. Or something like that.

Have your wiki users surprised you with unexpected uses for your corporate wiki? Please share your story.

Going with the flow

One of the worst things anyone rolling out such a large-scale project such as our internal wiki can try to do is micromanage. It's also deadly to be on any sort of ego trip -- if you think about it, the amount of new ideas generated by wiki users is directly proportional to the passion you convey to your colleagues about wiki possibilities. You can hardly plant seeds of inspiration and not expect them to grow.

Even though it's still early days, I've been thrilled at the amazing ways in which our colleagues have twisted, turned and pounded the wiki into submission to meet their specific needs. I see myself, in my role as a wiki community manager, as a facilitator, sounding board, encourager, etc. My job, as I see it, is to coax the wiki creativity out of my colleagues and set them loose. This results in a wiki that's more innovative, more democratic and frankly more fun. Oh, and which has more go-to-market ideas.

So the wiki ROI flow looks like this:

Training about the wiki --> Excitement about possibilities --> Facilitation of ideas to execution --> End result

Has this been your experience too?

My wiki wishes for 2009

Welcome to 2009. Never one to buck a trend (*cough*), I'd like to follow the example of countless other bloggers and share my wishes for 2009 -- my wiki wishes, that is. So here goes:

1. Get everyone at the company using the wiki on a regular basis.

2. Getting a clearer understanding of how the wiki is actually being used.

3. Getting a clearer understanding of why folks aren't using the wiki for [fill in the blank]. Along with #2, this will help us see how the wiki will fit within our evolving social media ecosystem.

4. Using the wiki to manage more projects across the company.

5. Enabling others within the company to take greater ownership over different parts of the wiki.

6. To point #3, finding ways to make the wiki more user friendly/less scary. This will involve training, for sure, but we also need to find ways to build "bridges" (technical and even psychological/procedural) between the wiki and how people interact now. In other words, how can we make it more "natural" for folks to use the wiki?

7. Findings ways to quantify the monetary benefits of using the wiki and ways to use the wiki to pull together for management stats related to sales. This would seem to be an important thing given the current economic climate.

I should probably list more goals list here, but that's a start. What are your wiki wishes for 2009? Come on. Don't be shy.