Wiki Considerations for Corporate Intranets
A Wiki is server-based software that enables any person to create and edit published content using only their browser.
Wiki’s supports basic HTML markup including hyperlinks to other documents in the Wiki as well as to locations within and outside of the Intranet. Most Wiki’s provide a Wiki markup language and the best Wiki’s provide WYSIWYG technology, so adding content is as simple as creating a Word document.
Wiki supports centralization and presentation of corporate data source documents in a variety of formats including spreadsheets, word processing documents, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, e-mail files, etc. Wikis can also be configured to access and display data from databases.
While Wikipedia, the world’s largest user-maintained online encyclopedia, is a great example of a Wiki, the use in business for collaboration on a project goes far beyond simple collaboration on definition of terms.
Wiki Benefits
- Permits the rapid exchange of information between departments, teams and diverse members of the organization.
- Low technical barrier to usage promotes collaboration across users with varying technical skill sets.
- Supports collaboratively building sales presentations, documentation, knowledge bases, etc.
- Agenda and meeting management.
- Managing after action reports/lessons learned.
- Involves the entire organization in helping to build and maintain the corporate knowledge base.
Corporate Considerations
Wiki’s make a great platform for creating a corporate intranet. It is however very important to decide how the wiki can and should be used. Below is a beginning list of questions to consider:
- Is security needed?
- Do you want the credentials to be based on another application such as Active Directory?
- What types of content do you want the wiki to contain?
- What policies must be in place to ensure the content meets company standards and regulations?
- Will the Wiki be used as a company Knowledge Base?
- If so is there search criteria the wiki’s search engine must be able to meet?
- What is the structure, layout or information architecture of the wiki to best facilitate finding corporate knowledge?
- Are there Sarbanes Oxley, HIPPA or other regulations that must be followed when adding data to the wiki.
- It the wiki is used to create or host project documentation what are the procedures for editing project information?
- How should project teams communicate on a project with the wiki?
- If the wiki is used as the foundation for the entire intranet then what kind of corporate pages need to be developed and who will maintain them?
- What department will be responsible for monitoring the wiki and cleaning up old, dirty, bad, or illegal data?
The above list of questions is far from complete but it’s a start and should help you start thinking along the right lines if you’re interested in implementing a wiki in your company.
Proper planning leads to faster and more profitable implementation!
I was speaking with a Sr. VP of my company the other day about a project. He mentioned that we spent a large number of hours discussing the project in relation to implementing it. The veep was joking but implying we had wasted time discussing the project.
After writing up an overview of the project I realized that it may have been one of my most successful yet. We had no rework to do and deployed it successful and on time. The customer was happy and we did not have any rework to do.
In college I learned an interesting statistic from a text on software development and project management. The statistic says, it cost’s between 80% – 100% more to fix a problem at the end of a project then it does at the beginning.
I guess we could have spent less time planning and more time just doing.
I wonder how much that would have cost us?
Define what you want
I attended a seminar last night that was talking about the Law of Attraction. The presenter was Michael Losier. Michael hosts a radio show on the Oprah radio network about the law of attraction and is known as the “How-To” guy for Law of Attraction.
Michael is an entertaining speaker and in the hour in which he spoke I took 3 pages of notes and came away with a page of action items for my personal and business growth.
There were a number of tools that Michael spoke about but the one I liked best was My Ideal _____(BLANK)! It teaches you how to focus your brain on what you do want and can be used for business as well as personal development. This tool is used to help people define exactly what they are looking for and provide clarity. Here are the steps for using the tool.
1) Take a blank page of paper
2) At the top write My Ideal ____ (BLANK) – Let’s say prospect.
3) Draw a line down the center of the paper
3) On the left hand side write down Contrast (things I don’t like or want)
4) On the right side write Clarity (What I want)
5) Start a list of all the things you don’t want in an Ideal (prospect) in this case
6) After completing all the things you don’t want look at each of them and decide what you would like instead.
For example if I don’t want my prospect to be negative then I probably want my prospect to be positive.
7) After completing this exercise fold the paper in half and look at what you want. You have now defined your perfect prospect.
Next Step do this for Market Segment, Referral, meeting, project, supplier, blog, wife, life or whatever.
I tried this exercise with just a few topics and was amazed at the clarity it provided.
Viral marketing – Twentieth Century Fox
According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Twentieth Century Fox paid a high school valedictorian to plug a movie “I love you, Beth Cooper” in her graduation speech. The idea was to create a viral buzz for the movie. This idea came from a company called the Intelligence Group which Fox hired. Obviously the name Intelligence Group falls quite short. Companies have been very unsuccessful over time trying to mimic situations to get viral buzz. It seems buzz only really catches on when the buzz occurs independent of a companies efforts.
The book Citizen Marketers provides a load of excellent case studies of why and how viral buzz catches on and what it is that creates the buzz. One of the most important factors to buzz is the trust of the community and full disclosure from the company. If you want a message to go viral the community wants and needs to trust the message if they don’t trust the message the community will not only squash the message but they may give you a bunch of bad press as well. I’ve seen a bunch of cases where bad press was the viral buzz that ended up being created and in some cases such as EA games “acts of lust” contest they probably achieved their objective because bad cheep press is better than no press at all and they have created quite an anti EA buzz.
Case in point the Wall Street Journal article while not terribly critical of Fox does put them in a bad light as the speech and video failed to go viral, the school expressed disappointment, and the parents refused to comment. It seems to me Fox would have done better to consult one of there own companies to understand what creates viral buzz better by asking the folks at MySpace what really gets a viral campaign to take off.
Blog Talk Radio – Customer service situation #3
I do a weekly radio program on Blog Talk Radio. Blog Talk Radio is a service that provides a call in number and then does streaming audio over the Internet. They post to iTunes, tweet and update facebook for me. Overall I love the service and it’s free.
They also offer two levels of enhanced service. I signed up for the lower level enhanced service so I would be able to call my guests directly from the control panel. Unfortunately the service just didn’t work well. I emailed with and live chatted with customer service but they were just awful. There was no phone number to call and the service rep didn’t know what to do so she told to try contacting someone else but didn’t give me any information about who to contact. Then the function suddenly started working but the next time I logged in it did not work again.
So I hadn’t canceled the service yet as I really wanted the ability to conference people into the show but then I was billed and realized that since we hadn’t been able to get the functionality working it was time to cancel the premium service. Canceling the service was confusing. First I had to find where I could cancel the service. Then I hit the cancel button but did not receive any confirmation that the service was canceled, so I had to look around the site and I found something telling me that I had to notify BTL in writing that I was canceling. So I sent an email and asked for a refund. BTL responded to the email confirming that they canceled my service but had to refer me to another group for a refund. As of today 5 days after canceling I have not heard anything back from BTL.
Hmmm. They certainly are no Apple or even and Amazon. Good luck to BTL they’ll need it if they keep this type of customer service. I’ll continue to use the free service for now until I can find a better service else where.
Apple and Amazon Service
I recently signed up for both Mobile Me and Amazon’s Prime service. As it turns out I’m not continuing with either one of them. Mobile Me doesn’t work with Outlook when outlook is part of an exchange server, which makes it useless for my purposes. The Prime service I just don’t get enough benefit from to continue using it.
So Apple sends me an email yesterday saying I have seven days left on my free trial. In the email they tell me how much I’ll be billed, how to change my billing information and how to cancel if I wish. They obviously know they have a good service and assume most people will have a reason for leaving because the service does provide great value if you need it. It turns out I don’t need the service. I was able to cancel my account with no hassle what so ever and I even explained why I was canceling it when they asked because the process was made so easy.
Prime – I logged in to pay bills tonight and I see that my bank account is lower than it should be. Hmmm, I think to myself, Why is this? I look into the account details and what do I see, nothing but Prime staring back at me. No email warning, No this is how you cancel, No here is easy access to your account to cancel, No this is how much we’ll be charging your card in a few days nothing but a big fat hit to my account after the free trial ended. In my head Amazon is thinking “I know we can get at least on month hit out of this guy by charging him without warning. Maybe he’ll just cancel and not ask for his money back! HAHAHAHA” Okay well maybe that takes it a little far but you get the idea. I mean really how hard is it to tell your customers your going to bill them before you do? It creates such a better atmosphere of trust for the company and I can cancel if I really want to because maybe the service really wasn’t for me.
I’ve always loved Amazon and I think they are a great company. They are even one of the few affiliate programs I have advertised for in the past and still do on one of my other web sites, but I felt this Prime service they are offering is too expensive and maybe a little underhanded in how it’s marketed and then charged. The service is only valuable if you are ordering multiple times per month and unfortunately I just can’t afford to order that often.
I did call Amazon and received the service I expected. They removed the charge and took my suggestion to let people know before hand. I just hope they decide to act on it.
Proud New member
Friend Me
