What in the World is a Wiki?

Collaborating in the 21st Century

It’s no secret that internal collaboration and knowledge management are the keys to business growth and success. Accomplishing both is no small feat given the dynamic and ever-increasing demands companies face today. Plus, there’s the difficulty of implementing and enforcing processes to effectively support your interactions among employees as well as with prospects, customers and partners.

Fortunately, wikis can help. Wiki software is used to create websites that allow multiple users to create, modify and organize web page content in a collaborative manner. Wikis are perfect tools for companies that need to manage these critical relationships. Your collaboration processes and technologies must keep pace with – or, ideally, stay ahead of – changes in your market and customer base.

Wikis are easy-to-use, flexible tools that enhance existing work flow processes, rather than requiring re-engineering. As such, wikis present an opportunity to revolutionize workplace collaboration, much like e-mail has revolutionized communication.

Why wikis?
Wikis have three characteristics that make them ideal for enterprise collaboration: inherently collaborative, extremely flexible, and easy to adopt and use.

While previous technologies had one or more of these characteristics, none combined all three in a single, simple package. Their flexibility allows wikis to help “glue” various tools and platforms together. Wikis can be used for knowledge management, document management, project management, documentation, scheduling, meetings, directories and more.

Choosing wiki software
Once you’ve decided to use wikis in your enterprise, the next step is to decide whether to run your own wiki software or choose a hosted, on-demand provider. Although there are many viable wiki software options from which to choose (including free, open-source solutions), on-demand wikis are the better choice for most users and uses.

Your team can use a hosted wiki solution without help from your IT department because on-demand vendors have addressed the issues of security and reliability. Hosted wikis provide high-grade encryption, redundant data replication and full access controls. Because on-demand vendors focus solely on wiki hosting, they generally deliver better performance and reliability.

Why you need to know about wikis
Because wikis are flexible and simple to use, it’s easy to allow your users to start small, incrementally increasing their wiki usage. This allows you to enhance, rather than re-engineer, your existing workflow and processes.
Whether you’re trying to manage projects, share knowledge or simply document how your business works, wikis offer a collaboration solution people will actually use. Fortune 500 companies use wikis; why don’t you?
In case you were wondering, wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning quick or fast. So as a name for a collaborative tool, the word “wiki” says it all.