Unless you’ve been living under an Internet rock, you’ve probably heard about Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org). It is a great source of information on just about anything, with 2,915,098 articles. And, despite being crowd sourced by volunteers, it has been shown to be as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica.
Most companies have information silos. One person knows a tidbit of information, someone else knows another. Rarely does any small to medium business engage in what is known as knowledge management. Actually, rarely does any company.
The term wiki comes from the Hawaiian word for fast. Wiki’s are easy to set up; many are free, open source software. For a comparison of wiki software there’s a table on, no surprise here, Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software.
There are also services, ranging from free to subscription, that don’t even require you to set up or host your own wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_farms.
You could begin with company policies. Usually there are one or two people responsible for keeping them up to date. It might be human resources (an editable version of your personnel manual), but more useful policies might be shipping, backorders, etc.
But the real power of a wiki comes when you can get a group of “regular” employees to contribute hard learned knowledge. For instance, sales people could share what kind of pitches work best with different kinds of customers. Or production people could record tips and tricks on how to make a widget faster or easier.
The ultimate power of a wiki is when you can get several companies to collaborate. When we were manufacturers’ representatives, one of the frustrations we had were calls from vendor sales managers telling us someone else in the country was doing better than we were. My question was always “what are they doing differently?” Why can’t the various reps document their successes (and failures since they are good learning tools too) on a common, private wiki?
One challenge with wikis is getting people to participate. Wikipedia, the mother of all wikis, knows that 1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all articles. Your goal should be to have a majority of your community contribute something. Some contributors will generate most of the content, but you really want everyone you can to add a little something. It might take some incentives.
Wikis are a powerful way to capture knowledge within your company. They are fast. So what is keeping you from setting up a wiki for your company?
