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Neil Callahan implements an enterprise Wiki

On the Web at:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/062608-how-a-marketing-firm-implemented.html

How a marketing firm implemented an enterprise wiki
By C.g. Lynch , CIO

Network World
06/26/2008

Neil Callahan, President of CoActive Digital, had a simple idea for 
implementing a wiki at his New York-based marketing firm. He would start 
with a small

group, let them populate it with helpful information such as meeting notes 
and presentations, and then hold it up as an example to other departments. 
Those

groups, in turn, would create their own wikis.

But moving towards a new tool like a wiki for collaboration, especially when 
people are so used to exchanging information over e-mail, can be just as big 
a

cultural challenge as it is a technical one. E-mail has been the staple of 
communication for many firms for well more than a decade. As a result, 
Callahan

says, it's critical to have a business leader own the project and encourage 
wiki adoption. It also helps, of course, to pick a wiki with an easy user

interface so users won't shy away from contributing to it.

Picking a Social Software Platform

Large vendors such as Microsoft with its SharePoint platform have added 
social software to their offerings, but Callahan says such products 
(SharePoint in

particular) required too much time and effort to implement, especially for a 
company with only 300 full-time employees. "There is just too much policy 
and

governance management with SharePoint," he says. "We weren't going to kid 
ourselves into thinking we needed that. We aren't going to put people in the

penalty box if they don't adhere to some governance or policy."

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Instead, Callahan picked Socialtext, a company which makes wiki software 
designed for businesses. The Socialtext user interface allows people to edit 
and

manipulate information with no HTML or coding experience. Power users - 
people who edit frequently - can employ a variety of shortcuts to upload 
links,

documents and other information with greater efficiency.

While Socialtext offers customers the choice to host the data on premise, 
Callahan opted for a software as a service (SaaS) model where the vendor 
hosts the

data, citing lower maintenance costs. He also says he feels comfortable with 
the security the vendor provides.

"It's encrypted and protected, and we could put a VPN [virtual private 
network] around it if we needed to," Callahan says. "But we're not putting 
financial

statements and employee salaries on there or anything."

Pick Your Test Group

Callahan says he was adamant that moving workflows and processes from e-mail 
to wikis would only work if there was a good internal use case. So he turned 
to

his business development group, which has about 30 employees.

The business development group handles specific inquiries from customers and 
also coordinates how work will get done internally (dictating what group in 
the

company would handle a particular marketing pitch, for instance). As such, 
they have lots of meetings and accompanying documents (such as meeting notes 
and

PowerPoint presentations) that need to be organized and shared.

Traditionally, Callahan says most of this activity had been traded ad-hoc 
and over e-mail, which had its pitfalls. "You'd have people mail around a 30 
MB

file to 25 or 30 people," he says. "We wanted to look at a new way of 
sharing this stuff."

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Plant the Seeds, and Have a Leader

Knowing that he couldn't change the way people work overnight, Callahan 
populated the business development wiki with the types of documents that had 
been

traded over e-mail, such as meeting notes. This way, he says, when the users 
came onto the system for the first time, they immediately found useful

information.

But that wouldn't be enough to reverse years (or decades, depending on the 
age of the worker) of habits. After passwords and user names were given, 
some

people still didn't always log in to the wiki; instead, these users would 
stick to the practice of e-mailing the same documents around.

To combat this, Callahan says it's important to get buy-in from the leader 
of the group using the wiki. In this case, the head of the business 
development

team encouraged reports to use the tool by responding to emails with 
messages that implores them to add to, or read from, the wiki.

"She has been the steward of it," Callahan says. "She's been the person that 
has helped build adoption and change opinions."

Make a Good Legacy for the Future

Because social software like wikis are often a completely new piece of 
technology, users can tailor it to fit their needs-rather than demanding 
that users

adapt to it, like with traditional enterprise software. With wikis, Callahan 
says, it's important to reinforce to people that documents will no longer be

found in a tidy folder.

Instead, users will rely primarily on tagging and search. While search is 
like an online appliance, tagging does require a human element.

When it comes to tagging, Callahan says wiki administrators should encourage 
people to use human terms for their tags and try to avoid corporate jargon

unless it's absolutely essential because it will make the site more 
reader-friendly. "Tag it with natural language rather than stuff that 
doesn't mean

anything," he says.

Be Patient

Callahan himself believes in the power of search over foldering. He has 
Google Desktop, a search appliance that culls through a user's Windows 
deskop, as his

primary means of discovery.

"Browsing and folders were essential before you had index and search," he 
says. "I just have one folder, My Documents, where I search for everything."

But Callahan realizes everyone is not like him. After all, the construction 
of structured Windows folders was largely a legacy to how businesses stored 
paper

based documents - in neat, separated cabinets.

"This is new mentality," he says. For some people, this shift will be more 
of a psychological adjustment than a technological one.

After the CoActive business development group's users add more content to 
their wiki, Callahan will show it off to other groups and have them build 
their own

sites mirroring the same model. He is also experimenting with SocialCalc, a 
spreadsheet application that operates on wiki-like principles, where users 
can

edit numbers and interact with different data sets. Socialtext released the 
product at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston a couple weeks ago.

"The goal is for this to become our intranet," he says. "We want to get more 
teams collaborating on wikis."

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