Wikis or blogs - technology looking for a problem?

Wiki is a Hawaiian word for "quick," and some say it has the potential to change how the Web is used. A wiki is a type of Web site that has the ability to turn the company intranet into a giant corkboard on the wall of the office canteen to which employees can pin photos, articles, comments and other things.

A wiki can gather, in one place, the data, knowledge, insight and customer input that's floating around a company or other organization. And it's a living document, since workers who are given access to it can make changes constantly as no programming skills are required.

Is this Knowledge Management reinvented?

The failing with typical KM projects was that they were simply a huge hopper into which every bit of content was shoveled. Then clever software analysed the documents and categroised them so that they can be access later.

So is the wiki a freeform version of this? Or is it a way to make the intranet rather like the magnetic board in our kitchen crowded with lots of out of date papers, unread recipes from magazines, fast-food brochures and tide tables. A great idea, but someone needs to have the responsibility to keep it tidy every month or so and throw away things that are out of date and are never used.

But wikis are gathering some advocates. Despite its speedy name, the wiki is not a new idea and dates back to the mid-1990s. A programmer named Ward Cunningham, who wanted to create a platform for freewheeling collaboration in software development launched WikiWikiWeb. Techies used it to collectively work on software engineering projects. The aim is now to see if it can enable employees collaborate and communicate better electronically.

But there are plenty of product out there. E-Room which was recently sold to Documentum, and Lotus Notes from IBM. But these are heavy-duty expensive applications bought by the business for the business. The key difference is that a wiki seems to be a self-help, self-regulating approach on the intranet or internet – software used by the employees for the employees.

Some have described this as a collective-blog. As the Wall Street Journal eloquently put it “But if the blog is a soloist, a wiki is an orchestra. Not surprisingly, its sound can also be cacophonous if managed incorrectly and can be open to those whose changes are unwelcome or even damaging. That's why features such as access control, saving of revisions, stressing accountability and encouraging peer review of postings come into play. In addition, most users say an effective wiki must be pruned and weeded regularly to remain manageable.”

Until now, most wiki software has been open-source efforts such as TWiki. Their free software has been downloaded by tens of thousands of people, who then typically unleash it within companies on their own. This strikes fear into every IT department and operational manager. There is a danger this could be another distraction, another source of information, and could fall into the category of "occupational spam" -- endless, time-consuming and often pointless.

"People have tried very hard to take fragmented knowledge within corporations and put it somewhere that it can be used, but it's been an uphill effort," says Ross Mayfield, founder and chief executive of Socialtext, a Silicon Valley startup that has been leading the drive to sell wiki technology to companies since late 2002 by developing more sophisticated software and services for it. "Our focus is literally to get everyone on the same page."

But is this the right way for organizations to be managing critical information? A wiki may be valid for non-work situations, such as the well-known Wikipedia. This free online encyclopedia, compiled since early 2001 by volunteer writers, now has hundreds of thousands of entries, making it bigger than any other encyclopedia.

For information where the intended audience is known, where there is a need to maintain compliance and where there is little need for widespread collaboration - for example, the process and related documents for drug approvals - then it is probably better to use products from the established enterprise software vendors. But these vendors could probably learn from some of the presentation techniques which are making wikis so appealing.