6 Characteristics of a Wiki Champion

This is a cross posting of a piece I wrote for Stewart Mader who I have linked to many times here at Extacit. Based on my own experience, I have jotted down some of the characteristics that a Wiki champion may need to succeed:

Knowing the benefits that Wiki use can bring to your organisation is the easy bit! Driving adoption and selling that message is what will make you a Wiki champion.

A Wiki champion is important –

“a passionate, enthusiastic champion is essential to the success of wiki because s/he will be able to generate interest, give the appropriate amount of training for each person at the right time, monitor growth of the tool and fix problems that could derail adoption.” Source WikiPatterns

There are no set rules or processes to follow, only some emerging guidelines and best practices (known as patterns), so it is up to you to make it succeed. There is no better place to start than the 21 days of Wiki Adoption series here at Grow Your Wiki.

Like any new technology, there will be some resistance to Wiki adoption in your organisation. This can come from many sources, not just those who are not familiar with Web 2.0 or Social Computing. You must be clear about what you are trying to achieve with your Wiki deployment. So here are some of the characteristics you may need:

1. Be a Clear Communicator: Wiki and the ‘Wiki-Way’ of working will be new to many people in your organisation. It is important to keep things simple when selling the idea. I have found that gaining senior management support early for your project is important. Then you can let them sell the idea for you.
2. Be A Coach: Commonly known as ‘Wiki-Gardening’, you will need to coach some of the early users so that they can make best use of their Wiki from the beginning. They in-turn will pass this on to others, but a quick win is important to securing sustained engagement from your user community.
3. Be Patient: Be patient with your early adopters, allow them to sculpt their Wiki in their way. They will know what works best for the information they work with and the team members they deal with. Be ready to help when they need it.
4. Be Enthusiastic: People will react to your enthusiasm and knowledge of the ‘Wiki-Way’. Encourage others to try new things or to look at how they currently collaborate and show them how this could work in the ‘Wiki-Way’.
5. Be Engaging: As people begin to find their way with Wiki use, be available to discuss or help with continued use. Show them examples from other Wiki’s internally, so they can see what others are doing and adopt some of those practices themselves.
6. Have Fun!: This is one of the most important characteristics. Wiki adoption will be different in each organisation. Grassroots & organic seems to be an emerging successful trend, so there will be an element of exploration and innovation involved. Enjoy this period, communicate and engage with your user community and you will reap the rewards.

There may be many other challenges you could face, but if you get the formula correct for your organisation, then it is a great experience. You might even have people call you ‘The Wiki Guy’! Overall, a collaborative environment, where knowledge sharing and productivity has improved is a very welcome outcome of the Wiki adventure.

Wiki as a Knowledge Management Tool

My research has been focused on the collaboration and knowledge sharing elements of knowledge management in the enterprise. One of the key parts of this is to map what the enterprise wiki pilot is achieving against the basic knowledge cycle I started with when I began my first MSc (I have just started my second!).

So, looking at the 4 elements of the KM cycle above:

Find
Wiki use in the enterprise allows you to combine the knowledge of many teams into one larger, community knowledge base. This gives the users a "place" or "home" for their contributions where they know that they can be easily used by others.

Organise
Wiki spaces in products like Confluence & Socialtext are hierarchicaly structured in the parent-child page relationship which makes them easy to understand and to administer. Additional features such as tagging, breadcrumb navigation and powerful contextual search makes information retrieval much better than email + file shares. Some early responses with our wiki pilot have indicated that the benefits of having a web-based document sharing tool which can index-search attachments to provide a more powerful information retreival service is a very welcome addition to their job roles.

Share
Here is where the "Wiki Way" shines. There have been many groupware products in the past which have facilitated centralised, web-based document management, but wiki's provide this with the important collaboration layer that web 2.0 enables on top. They are a much more intuitive environment to interact with and will be around for a long time, as your n-generation graduate intake will already be trained in these environments from their own social interactions on the web!

Use & Reuse
As is mentioned on Stan Garfield's Weekly Knowledge Management Blog this week - 3 major benfitis of KM are avioding redundant effort, avioding repeated mistakes and taking advantage of existing knowledge and expertise within your organisation. A collaborative working environment supported by wiki use can help deliver on some of these benefits.

It is easy to forget the base principles which are enabled by web 2.0 tools when put to use in a business environment. We must be able to recognise the simple goals which culture and technology in the past have prohibited. A changing world with more and more distributed and virtual teams require organisations to provide its knowledge workers with tools which facilitate distributed and virtual collaboration.

21 Days of Wiki Adoption by Stewart Mader

Keep a close watch on Stewart Maders 21 days of Wiki Adoption. This set of 21 short videos will help you to understand the concept of Wiki use in your organisation.

Stewart is the author of 2 books, Wikipatterns and Using Wiki in Education. I have followed his blog on wiki patterns for some time now, and he is great at explaining the wiki concept in "plain english" just like the guys at CommonCraft.

The key thing about this series of videos is the simplicity and clarity of the examples that Stewart delivers. I frequently get asked in my organisation - "What is a wiki?" (this normally comes about 15 mins into my demo of our enterprise wiki!).

But that is ok for me, as if it takes them 15 mins to query the technology, then maybe the underlying benefits of collaboration, knowledge sharing and intuitive information retrieval are more prominent. The best bit is when we get to the cost!

So follow Stewart's videos and learn! As Luis Suarez said:

I bet, I know, I am sure of it, that after watching through the entire show with the different episodes, you would be more than ready to start deploying those wikis within your organisation.