Stewart Mader, Atlassian's wiki evangelist, recently presented a series of seminars on 'How do you grow wiki adoption?'.
During the presentation in Sydney, an attendee asked how to use a wiki for Document Management. While the gentleman could appreciate all the benefits that a wiki brings, he couldn't fathom how to move his organisation out of the 'Document dark ages' and into the enlightened age of Web 2.0.
This, indeed, is the focus of the 
website — a place to share ideas about how to roll-out wikis. These roll-outs often happen by stealth, helping individual teams and business units rather than by corporate edict.
You'll also need a change of mindset — don't think document management, think knowledge management. Document management can only point you towards documents, like a traditional search engine. In contrast, when you've got information on a wiki you can search for information, link to it, reference it, update it, secure it, blog about it and share it.
Fortunately, since Atlassian is a relatively new company (we turned 5 this year), we are fortunate that most of our internal information is stored on our internal Confluence wiki rather than in documents on fileservers. This is very important given that we have a mixed environment of Operating Systems (Mac, Windows, Linux) and that very few people in the company use Microsoft Office. We don't even use much paper since we scan more than we print.
The real benefit, however, is in keeping track of corporate information in a central, searchable location rather than on individual's hard disks. Historical corporate knowledge is instantly available to new staff members rather than being maintained in private e-mail archives. Information is maintained, even when staff leave and erase their hard disk.
So what do you seek — Documents or Knowledge?
5 Comment(s)
I'm REALLY new to blogs and wikis and would like to ask a question, and maybe this is not the place to ask. I'm taking a class on Web 2.0 for our school district so I can follow up with my instructor. How is the information that is posted on blogs and wikis backed up and protected? I would like to know this so I could be more comfortable knowing that the information is safe, and would not be altered by an unauthorized person. I manage the school district's help desk and mainframe operations center and see where this would be a great place to interact with our users.
By Cathy Currier at November 14, 2007 9:54 AM
Hi,
I have a few posts on how wikis and EDMS are different and complement each other.
I like the wiki as a user interface, a website that points to stuff in the EDMS, a collective social filter page of the gems in the EDMS...who wants to go to an EDMS, it's an ugly filing cabinet.
So I'm saying they are complementary, it's just the wiki is the gateway (you get to files in the EDMS via a wiki), and it's communal to boot.
Even further is that a wiki is not just a link gateway page, the content itself can be wiki pages...instead of word docs in the EDMS as minutes of meetings, just use a wiki page.
Plus the wiki itself can set minutes of meetings agenda's and updates to the agenda without emails back and forth, as long as you subscribe to the wiki page changes.
See my thoughts:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/06/23/wiki-and-edms/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/07/06/wikis-edms-and-office-20/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/07/28/my-documents-20/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/09/07/events-dms-and-wiki/
By John Tropea at December 1, 2007 9:15 PM
Best regards!
Impressive.
By Vance Kinney at December 5, 2007 7:34 PM
John - you definitely caught my eye with the title of this post, and I think you have it mostly right. I've spent 13 years in the "ECM Industry" and now work at the largest (over 50,000 associates) non-profit association of ECM professionals, AIIM.org. Have covered (and used) the gamut of philosophies and systems covering explicit documents to the more lofty goals of "knowledge management" and the implied desire of knowledge sharing.
Let me step back for a second though - EDMS is a very old term, and can mean many things. If you're talking about "pure" DM (document management), then yes, it's more or less a glorified electronic filing cabinet.
Step forward into a more overarching philosophy and system, ECM (enterprise content management), and (in theory, but not always in practice), ECM is about the entire lifecycle, and processes revolving around content, from creation, revision, distribution, management, declaring as a record, destruction, formatting in multiple formats depending on device used (or need for long-term storage, print output, etc.).
So, to your points. In many cases, yes, DM/EDMS/ECM (as typically deployed) thinks of documents/content as stand-alone pieces, and lacks the linking and interactivity that many people find a strength of wikis. Not always the case of course, and compound documents, documents assembled on the fly via business rules, and XML/SGML formatted documents that transform as needed, are examples of the opposite end of the spectrum.
Modern WCM (web content management) may expose this more explicitly, if done well - with e-marketing campaigns that are smart enough to manage the e-mail, banner ads, multimedia clips, landing pages, and follow-on materials as a fully interlinked bundle.
On the "new" front - Wikis are still a bit painful for most "normal" (average worker) people to understand, although Wikis have come a long way since I was first laughed out of the room among fellow analysts about 5 years ago. "Why would anyone want to hand markup content in some weird shorthand? And what about security?" Ah, those were the heady days of "enterprise wikis" all right! ;)
Some of the stranger metaphors that people seem to continue to stumble on, in creating a document, by first creating a link to nowhere, and THEN creating the document "on the fly" are especially bizarre to most people.
My overarching point - having spent about 10 years in the Knowledge Management realm - is Enterprise 2.0, and components, especially wikis, Knowledge Management 2.0? Collaboration 2.0? (forget the 2.0 for a minute - is it simply the next evolutionary stage of all of these things?)
I think the answer is "Yes" to all of these, although I believe that one of the secrets to adoption of wikis, blogs, or things like these, is to use what people are already comfortable with, such as file directories (perhaps mimicing WebDAV, or some sort of desktop-accessible [from the "windows explorer" or "finder" desktop] file structure metaphor), as well as the ability to input/output to "traditional" office tools, such as e-mail systems, "office-like" interfaces, etc., rather than anticipate everyone will fully embrace the "wiki way" and kill off the old toolsets.
Early adopters will do that, geeks will do it (no offense meant - I'm easily a big ol' geek myself), but the mainstream (huge market) is allergic to wholesale adoption of a (mostly) foreign batch of concepts.
In the end, I agree that much of the point is to get all of the content and discussions out into a common framework, and for me, I'm perfectly happy to call that Knowledge Management.
I suspect that John Tropea (another commenter) and I are largely in agreement there, although I haven't yet perused his many postings. Complementary, rather than "the king is dead, long live the new king."
Apologies for the length - if I'd had more time, the comment would've been shorter (as the saying *almost* goes).
By Dan Keldsen at December 18, 2007 4:03 AM
Maybe i'm wrong, but this link is dead http://www.wikipatterns.com/?cid=wp_badges :(
It's redirecting to http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns
This is normal?
By Max Pharmacie at June 1, 2008 4:31 AM