I know how heretical this may sound, but is social media outside the firewall truly productive? I guess I can guess some of the answers in terms of wisdom of clouds, tapping into the mindset of consumers and turning that into lucrative products, niche marketing in the long long tail. But, does any of this actually generate wealth? In the firewall we create things and sell them, that’s the business model. Most of what goes on there is invisible. We want at least some privacy, and often we want a lot, confidentiality is important to any business – few, if none can be 100% transparent.

Which side of the firewall is hotter?

• Underground efforts yield big results. Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, and then sanctioning them within the enterprise.
• Frontline workers are driving the vision. Often, senior managers aren’t open to the possibilities for enterprise 2.0 innovation because they’re not actively using these tools outside of work. Indeed, many senior managers still consider such tools as something their kids do. One of the dirty secrets of enterprise 2.0 is that you don’t have to teach or convince younger workers to use these tools; they expect them and integrate them as easily into their work lives as they do in their personal lives.
• Communities are self-policing. When left to their own devices, communities police themselves, leaving very little need for tight organizational control. And such peer-to-peer policing is often more effective than a big brother approach. Companies that we studied said abuse was rare in their communities.
• Business need is the big driver. Although our report discusses specific tools (blogs, wikis, and such), enterprise 2.0’s power is not about tools, it’s about the communication shift that those tools enable.
• Organizations must cede power. Using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers has taught many companies that they can no longer control the message. This also rings true when using Web 2.0 tools for internal communication. Companies that once held to a command-and-control paradigm for corporate messaging are finding it hard to maintain that stance.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/social-intranet-features.html

The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being “wikified.” The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.
“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”

NY Times US Army Wiki

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) defines Enterprise 2.0 as “a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise”. Does that make sense to you?

We’ve found it helpful to think about the needs that enterprise social software strives to meet. We call these the 3-c’s:

• Corporate memory – Don’t re-invent the wheel
• Collaboration – Help people work together on their stuff
• Communication – Share the stories
• BONUS: Customer engagement – Get closer to customers

Corporate memory

Traditionally a corporation’s technology systems capture only formal structured information. Using databases and Intranets these systems impose a heavy burden on the “imputters” of data. The barriers to capture of information are high, and the meta-data structures are unwieldy and unresponsive, so much of the useful informal information is never captured to start with. Enterprise social software helps to fill this hole. By encouraging self-publishing (blogs), people-driven categorisation (tagging), natural information organisation (wikis), and the capture of conversations (blogs, wikis, comments) a corporation builds a corporate memory that outlast the comings and goings of staff and management.

Collaboration

Project management is dead! Long live project collaboration. Social software helps to meet one of the main deficiencies of traditional project management tools, by moving the focus from task-driven to people-driven methodologies. Successful projects are successful when the teams “works”. Enterprise social software provides tools to let teams share their ideas (wikis), understand people’s strengths so the best resources can be rallied (wikis/messaging), write collaborative documents (wikis) and manage shared tasks more effectively (user friendly task managers).

Communication

Much of enterprise social software works to increase and facilitate better communication. This ranges from Instant messaging, Twitter-like messaging (see SocialText’s Signals, conferencing, RSS feeds. In fact, anthing that helps people communicate better, and outside the silos of traditional corporate structures.

Customer engagement

The bonus 4th c is Customer Engagement. We don’t usually include this in the same story, because the focus is clearly on marketing. However many of the same tools use for 3cs can also be deployed for Customer Engagement to create deeper engagement with customers.

Enterprise social software can be used in different areas of the marketing and sales cycle, from product research (blogs/private communities), mid-funnel engagement (forums/blogs) to post-sales support (wikis/communities). The best resource to understand the application of enterprise social software to customer engagement is Forrester’s Groundswell book.

If there is anything that unifies these different concepts, I think its that social software values people over process. Choosing the right software, will depend to a large extent on where your “people” needs lie.

Some of reasoning in support:

• Gartner Social Software Report 2008: Advises functional gaps exist with wiki and social tagging. Partners may be required to achieve a full solution.
• Sharepoint has come from a document management and Intranet legacy, and moves into wiki/social tools occurred only in 2007. Wikis are not the main game. Microsoft representatives admit that Sharepoint does not compete with the best wikis
• Sharepoint’s strengths are not in social tools eg. wikis (see this Article in CIO).
• The built-in Wiki is missing key enterprise features. Kwizcom (a Sharepoint Partner) market a Wiki+ product. They provide as useful list of the deficiencies in the Sharepoint  wiki including: tagging, content templates, comments/discussions, wiki markup language, Email alerts for content changes.
• Philosophy: Are you are trying to use a Wiki to help drive cultural change to a more open and collaborative environment?  Microsoft’s heritage is in command and control systems, and Sharepoint is designed to allow micro-level access/workflow approvals for content approval. You need to ask, Does Microsoft “get” social software?
• Costs: Licence costs are complex to calculate as they are dependant on existing MS Server and Office licences.

The bottom line: Successful wikis are based on ground-up contributions. An enterprise wiki MUST be easy to use with quick learning curve. Best of breed enterprise wikis utilize many of the features of Web 2.0 to make their wikis “simple to use”.  The inbuilt wiki lacks essential features such as tagging, page version comparisons, and email notifications. Sharepoint’s wiki and collaboration features are just not mature enough yet. 

Moving forward: Sharepoints strengths in document management, workflow, and its custom development environment will be attractive to the IT Department. You may well end up with Sharepoint driving your DMS and Intranet, but this doesn’t mean you can’t adopt a wiki now. The major enterprise wiki provide Sharepoint Connectors, for example Confluece Sharepoint Connector and SocialText Socialpoint. Or if Sharepoint is already well established evaluate Sharepoint add-ons such as KwizCom Wiki Plus.

Note: The link to Sharepoint comments has been pointed to Wayback page. The page on the Sharepoint blog has been pulled down – as Lawrence Liu has now left the Sharepoint team to join Telligent.

This article looks at the process of determining what content is appropriate for the wiki.

An Enterprise Wiki and an Intranet built on a Content Management System have a lot in common:

• They are both web-based system; accessed via a browser.
• They both allow users to create and share pages, and attach documents, such as PDFs.
• Enterprise Wikis and Enterprise CMS systems have access control capabilities, allowing administrators to section off the site and allow different users rights to view and edit content.
• Modern versions of each allow for easy creation and editing of pages using Word-like rich text editors.

In the last few years we’ve also see a growing convergence between CMS and Enterprise Wiki functionality, with CMS systems such as MS Sharepoint adding tagging, wiki-markup and other social features, and Enterprise Wikis like Confluence adding advanced Access Control and version control for attached documents.

Given the convergence of feature its becoming more difficult to decide “what goes where”. However there are three core features of a wiki, that differentiate it from the other CMS systems:

• The inter-relationship of the pages is defined by links created by users
• The categorisation of the content is created by users, using tags
• Page comparisons, versioning and rollbacks allow users to easily create and collaborate on content

If you look at these three features, I think the core difference between a wiki and a CMS becomes clearer. The tools of the wiki are tools of participation – creation, collaboration, organisation, connection, and  reaction. While a CMS has traditionally been a tool for publishing – in which a smaller group of users are contributors, and the majority are spectators.

If you have an existing Intranet then the first thing you need to do is audit the Intranet content.

Before I move on to talk about the criteria for determining if content should be wiki-fied, I want to talk about the impact of “search” on location of content. If you are ahead of the curve and have already implemented Enterprise Search that can search across your Intranet, Wiki, and document repositories then this won’t be such an issue. However for the vast majority of medium and large enterprises findability remains a tricky issue. Modern CMS systems and Enterprise Wikis have the capacity to search their own content in web-pages and in most attachment formats such as PDF, Word and Excel. However, without enterprise or federated search capabilities, your Wiki Search will not find Intranent content and vice versa. This means that if you move content from the Intranet to a Wiki you need to educate your users about where to search for what content. (And adding a Document Management System into the mix, means there will be one more place to search!).

Our approach to Intranet is to do an audit of the Intranet content, and then assess whether the content should be brought across to the wiki using several criteria:

• How often will this content be updated?
• How many people are involved in writing the content?
• Is there a required sign-off for the content to be published?
• What are the implications if the content is not correct or up to date?
• Does the content evolve over time?
• Do you receive feedback that the content is out of date?
• Does the content include complex formatting?

We then work thru the content and decide on whether it should be wiki-fied.