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.

Having trouble trying to sell in Web 2.0-style collaboration to the higher ups in your enterprise organization? Are there VPs and CXOs that are shying away from wiki-style knowledge management because they don’t get it or they fear confidential information will be passed carelessly among employees and partners? Do they feel that the information is too sensitive, that it might get into the wrong hands?

Whatever information they have, no matter how sensitive, it’s definitely not as critical or as classified as the CIA. Tell your boss, “If the CIA can collaborate with Web 2.0 tools, so can we.”

Sean Dennehy and Don Burke are two CIA employees who are also leading advocates for the Intellipedia, a Web 2.0 collaboration environment created by the Department of National Intelligence (DNI) for the intelligence community.

During their presentation, “From the bottom up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community,” Dennehy and Burke spoke about the difficulty of convincing the country’s most secretive organization to share information using Web 2.0 collaboration tools. After their presentation, I asked them on video (after we received clearance from the public affairs office) to discuss the difficulty of selling in the collaboration platform, the need for the CIA to share information at critical moments with other intelligence gathering organizations, and how their greatest detractors have become their most enthusiastic users. Enjoy the six minute interview.

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

Sean Dennehy and Don Burke of the CIA showed off the structure of Intellipedia which is foremost a wiki for the Director of National Intelligence. The CIA was the pilot customer for Intellipedia and Burke and Dennehy are two of its leading advocates.

Intellipedia is a closed knowledge management system with three levels of access ranging from top secret, to secret, to sensitive but unclassified. But beyond just a wiki, Intellipedia has also become the brand name for a suite of other common Web 2.0 tools such as bookmarking and video. No need for me to go on and on explaining it. Dennehy and Burke posted all the information (and more) explaining it on the Enterprise 2.0 community site.

It wasn’t easy for them. Some saw their desire to create an intelligence information and social network as traitorous. Luckily, they were able to show that a government intelligence community with a wiki was possible for the intelligence community and its partners to answer the burning question of “What did you know, and when did you know it?”

Make sure you watch my video interview with Burke and Dennehy.

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