What is an enterprise wiki?

I’ve seen many attempts to answer the question “what is a wiki?" Many of them are very useful. But I’d like to take a shot at answering that question from an enterprise perspective.

The reality is that wikis need to be understood in the context of how large organizations work today and the tools that currently support them.

When we talk to big customers and prospects, even though we see ourselves as fundamentally different, we often get asked about how we relate to existing enterprise software such as content management systems from Vignette and Interwoven or portal solutions such as Plumtree and SharePoint or even knowledge management solutions from vendors such as Knova, RightNow and Kana.

These systems are obviously different in scope and architecture from our enterprise wiki but I think it’s fair that we get questions about these vendors. Wikis and traditional enterprise content management and portal solutions have content creation and communications as core functionality.

What makes a wiki so different from these traditional systems is that they are optimized for speed and rich feedback. Wikis are not just content management systems with an edit button on each page. Wikis are designed from the ground up for speed and this is vital to their success and it is big part of the difference between wikis and traditional enterprise systems.

This is also why I’m very skeptical of the idea that traditional content management and portal vendors will “add wiki functionality” to their applications. That idea doesn’t work because a system cannot be optimized for two different goals. For example, a Porsche is designed for speed and a Ford F-350 is designed for power. They are both good at what they do but trying to optimize the Ford F-350 for speed would be a bad idea and would never match the performance of the Porsche.

In addition to being optimized for speed wikis are optimized for rich feedback. This makes them highly adaptive which leads to the creation of an information resource that is very relevant and very up to date. The open editing and discussion features that are core to the wiki design help ensure that the content produced is constantly adapting and benefiting from new feedback. This approach is directly counter to systems that focus on control and hierarchy.

In an enterprise environment wikis still need the ability to ensure accountability and compliance with corporate rules and legal requirements but they are designed to do this without sacrificing the core design principles of a wiki.

In some cases enterprise wikis will completely replace an organization’s existing content management and knowledge management technology and in some cases they will co-exist. In today’s fast changing and highly competitive world optimizing for speed and rich feedback is often a very wise choice.

So from an enterprise perspective one way to answer the question “what is a wiki?” is to say that it’s a next generation content management (or knowledge management) solution that acknowledges the enterprise’s requirements for accountability but that is optimized for speed and rich feedback.

Comments

[Michael Daum]

In general speed and rich feedback contradict each others. For example, traditional cms systems precompile pages in large chunks. As content in wikis is changing more frequently and depending on a lot more conditions, doing the same in wikis is uncommon. Wikis are _not_ optimized for speed but for user control.

[Brian Keairns]

Michael, good point. I think we actually agree about this but what I was saying about wikis and speed may not have been totally clear. From a system performance perspective a traditional CMS would be more optimized for speed but a wiki is optimized for speed from a user experience perspective. Meaning its faster and easier for users to add or change content, navigation, etc.