What does it take to pull off a successful wiki? Jeffrey Walker of Atlassian and Linda Skrocki, Sr. Enginering Program Manager for Blogs, Wikis, and Forums at Sun Microsystems showed examples of successful enterprise-level wikis plus offered advice on how to pull off a successful wiki in your enterprise.

First, some examples of successful wikis:

• Vodafone: Combine blogs and wikis. CEO blogs on the wiki. 65,000 employees.
• Leapfrog: Their finance department has a wiki. It’s designed to give new users a tour, plus it acts as a practical home page with useful things.
• SAP - SAP’s wiki (sdn.sap.com) has 800,000+ registered users using the wiki. Could conceivably be the largest corporate wiki.
• Deutsche Bahn - With over 270,000 employees (only 80,000 are online) they have 15,000 using the wiki. They reward contributions to knowledge management with the 42nd Marvin Awards, referring to the paranoid android Marvin from Douglas Adams’ “HItchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Marvin’s answer to every question is 42.

Skrocki’s three tips for successful blogs and wikis:

1. Relax and TRUST your contributors - Give up control. People will use their common sense.
2. Seed the site for success - That means create content. Engage power users in pilot, you’ll need pre-launch evangelism, communication, and stakeholder buy-in. Set up training tools such as instructional videos, 101 sessions for & by users, getting started content, and FAQs.
3. Guide and nurture a self-sufficient community - Enable users to self-train, -police, -support, -evangelize, -organize, and most importantly -grow.

How to get people up and running on the wiki:

• Induction - Encourage people to write a personal profile
• Useful content that they need every day - e.g. Staff contact list
• Project management - Incorporate that into a repeatable cycle in your business
• Useful widgets - Add a task list or other tools that make it easy to use.
• Charts - Create useful dashboards with real-time data
• Internal blog - Share news and internal discourse
• Social organization - Encourage non-work use. You want people to become comfortable with the tool so let them use it that way.
• Permissions - Be as open as you can possibly be.

Recommended site: wikipatterns.com for advice on setting up and designing a wiki.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

Moderator, Jessica Lipnack, and panelists/blogger Patti Anklam, Doug Cornelius, Cesar Brea, and Bill Ives introduced a PowerPoint presentation-free discussion about what blogging brings to businesses. In a desire to immediately create community, Lipnack asked all the bloggers in the overflowing room to stand up, identify themselves, plus mention their blog. I made sure to stand up and announce my blog, The Spark Minute, while also mentioning that I was blogging for this conference.

Here’s a summary of the issues and points about blogging that were brought up:

• A blog is a personal knowledge management system. That’s your initial audience. From that it grows to people who share your interest.
• People start blogs because they’re tired of answering the same questions over and over again. It’s kind of like a personal FAQ of their knowledge, or a personal knowledge management tool. I must say that’s what I use my blog for and the point above. I’m not necessarily annoyed with questions, it’s just more efficient for me. When people bring up an issue that I’ve written about, I’ll just say, “Oh, I wrote a post about that, I’ll send it to you.”
• Blogging disciplines you to collect thoughts and write them down.
• Not everybody should blog, because feedback doesn’t come immediately, and people will get frustrated by it and quit. Just saying, “Let them try” is ok if you don’t have to use company resources to set them up and train them.
• Micro-blogging creates more relevant connections than blogging.
• Ask yourself, “What’s the business reason for writing this post” before you write.
• Who should blog? Someone who is social and likes to write.
• One person rightly complained that we were not staying on topic of the session title. “What does blogging BRING to business?”
• So 45 minutes into the conversation, Lipnack, the moderator said that blogging can make the environment appear as a much more accessible place to work. It’s a culture change.
• Regarding what does “blogging” mean to business, it shouldn’t be isolated to just blogging. It’s just a tool or vehicle. You have to find out what communications mechanism is right for your environment and objective. Blogs just happen to be a very versatile platform.
• Argument against, “Who’s going to pay for their time to write the blog?”
• What is it in their daily work that they need to be communicating? What are they doing now and how can they do it in a blog?
• Fastest way to get your business to come around is to show the competition is doing it.
• A voice doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a blog. Don’t get hooked on the term blog. The point is to engage and have channels and avenues for staff to express themselves in the way they like. Could be a discussion board, Twitter, or a full fledged company social networking tool.
• It develops an initial level of trust before you actually meet a person. Because you’re judged first on the words you write.
• A blog lets you prove your expertise. Claiming expertise without it today can be difficult.

More coverage of this session at the Internet Evolution blog.

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.