Michael Idinopulos has made an interesting distinction between different uses of wikis. According to him wikis fall into two broad categories:
- In-the-Flow wikis enable people to do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself. These wikis are typically replacing email, virtual team rooms, and project management systems.
- Above-the-Flow wikis invite users to step out of the daily flow of work and reflect, codify, and share something about what they do. These wikis are typically replacing knowledge management systems (or creating knowledge management systems for the first time).
This is exactly why implementing a wiki for knowledge management purposes is not just a matter of merely implementing the wiki. People do not collaborate very much in above-the-flow ways without an incentive to do so. Therefore it is critical to realize that, as Idinopulos puts it, “the challenge of getting people to use above-the-flow wikis is an above-the-flow thing, not a wiki thing.”
Knowledge management contributions
A knowledge management system can be a very valuable asset for a company and the collaborative input of employees brings the system to an even higher level. Unfortunately contributions to these systems are from an above-the-flow type. Therefore Andrew McAfee proposes the idea to change job definitions to put these kind of contributions in-the-flow. He suggests that at least for some employees their job description could state something like “being helpful at the enterprise level using Enterprise 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, folksonomies, Q&A forums, comments, prediction markets, ratings, etc.” Because companies would truly like their people to spend some portion of the work week looking around, helping others, communicating and using their expertise, etc. Therefore McAfee suggests to put these IT-enabled activities in the flow.
Create support for Enterprise 2.0 tools
Next to this ‘top-down’ approach to stimulate the usage of these type of Enterprise 2.0 tools, it is also important to create fertile ground within the organization itself. To do this a pilot should be started with proponents of the tool. Start a wiki project for example with IT minded employees, since they have no technological barrier to start using the wiki. When the rest of the organization sees what the added value of the wiki is for day-to-day tasks, they will start working with it as well.
Create momentum
McAfee states that to date it has been hard for people to work above and beyond their ‘normal’ jobs. Because doing so typically involved physical displacement – hopping on a plane, going to a meeting, etc. – and so was time consuming, inconvenient, and often costly. A good point he makes is that Enterprise 2.0 technologies greatly lower these barriers to work above and beyond one’s ‘normal’ job. But unfortunately theory does not always equal the perception of the users. Therefore it is important to create momentum for the tool to support its usage. Like stated before this can not be done by simply implementing a tool. To create momentum, organizations could (among others) put participation in job descriptions and start a pilot with proponents of the tool.
