How many wikis are too many?

The rising popularity and ubiquity of wikis on the internet (Wikipedia is the
quintessential example) is driving a similar pattern of adoption on
the other side of the firewall, inside corporations large and small.

A recent eWeek article entitled "Wikis Are Alive and Kicking in the
Enterprise" ("Veni, vidi, wiki" in the print edition), gives some
interesting insights into how wikis are being used in a couple of
large companies.

The first example is Motorola, with about 68,000 employees. Wikis
were introduced into the company about 18 months ago. They had 500
wikis after six months, 1,000 wikis after a year, and now the number
is 3,200! Corporate VP of IT Toby Redshaw was quoted as saying, "I'm
not sure how many more we're going to have - 3,200 wikis is a lot.
We'll probably top out around 4,000." Motorola uses several different
wiki products: Open Text, TWiki, and (literally) uncounted others.
How do they manage to keep it all under control? They don't. Redshaw
said "We don't have a wiki police group... we just think it's the way
to business runs." They do however, have a group of 250 volunteer
"knowledge champions" who take responsibility for different subject
areas in the Open Text platform. When asked why Motorola had taken to
the new platforms, Redshaw said, "One reason is generational. Another
is our affinity for technology. People take to it because we're an
engineering-based firm."

The second example is Novell. Their use of wikis started a couple of
years ago when an engineer installed a wiki server under the desk of
Lee Romero, manager for knowledge and collaboration services. Later,
Romero devised a wiki strategy for the entire company, setting up a
corporate wiki for all employees. Romero said, "It promotes openness
for both reading and authoring; it's a collaborative environment.
It's much more efficient when the work product is a document." Like
Motorola, Novell uses several different wiki products: MediaWiki (for
enterprise use), TWiki (for engineering use), and what Romero calls
"renegade" wikis. Most of the renegades run on TWiki, and Romero says
he knows very little about them, but the company tolerates this,
presumably because of the benefits it derives. Romero estimated the
IT support for all their wikis to be about one-quarter of one person's
time per year.

What can we conclude from these examples? Without going too far out
on a limb, here's what I think:

1. Wikis deliver. Most wiki products are relatively easy to install,
use, and administer. Many are free, open source products. People
like 'em because that's what they have on the Internet. The
benefits from the inherently open nature of wikis and the low cost
make their use a no-brainer.

2. Multiple wiki products are OK. Some wiki products are better for
some purposes than others; you may need more than one or two
different products to meet the varied needs of a large
corporation. Some organizations think that allowing multiple
products necessarily means high operating costs and requirements
for personnel trained to maintain the various products. The
experiences of Motorola and Novell seem to indicate that these
concerns are hardly worth thinking about, compared to the
benefits. Rather than worrying about the number of different wiki
products, it is more important to think about the value of the data
in them. They should worry about making sure that valuable
corporate data is regularly backed up and searchable by all
employees who might need to get to it.

J.A.W.