Our IT department (which I'm part of) has an internal Sharepoint based Wiki, our aspiration is to make it, as Wikipedia is, the place you start from when looking for information. It's supposed to include all kinds of information: general technological issues like how to install a VM, more specific issues like how to change the infrastructure for an IAS and even not work related topics like take aways to stay away from.
We're not at all there yet, and thinking about it I'm not sure we'll ever really get there. I can think of a several reasons:
1. A Wiki page is not really that good a replacement for a real document, a Wiki page can contain summarized information and maybe a link to the original document, but unless you have trouble finding the document, you don't really have a reason to look in the Wiki in the first place.
When looking for some arbitrary subject on the internet it's not always trivial to find a good document about it, so you use Wikipedia. In an IT department when looking for a documented issue it's simpler to just look for the document, since whoever documented the issue have probably written a document even if he wrote about it in the Wiki as well, and as mentioned, documents are better.
2. Specific issues like the mentioned example are too specific since they often address only one person, the one who wrote them down. Sure, people can forget and get replaced but still a document will do the job just as well.
3. The main reason as I see it.
A Wiki exemplifies the egg or chicken paradox. For people to use Wiki you obviously have to have some content, but for people to add content they usually have to consider the Wiki a source of information people use, not much point in writing something if nobody reads it.
Well, Wikipedia DOES work.
But let's say you have a blank new Wikipedia. Right, according to my assumption no one will
write anything, but after all, IT IS the internet. Even if one of every one thousand users writes something you get plenty of data, so now a higher percentile of the population is willing to donate their knowledge and so you get a plague-like effect where people use Wikipedia, find what they were looking for and add their own insights.
Now, lets get back to our department of about 30 people. Sure, we did write some pages at the beginning and even had a "Wiki week" in which we tried to add as much new content as possible, but as long as it's easier to ask the guy over the table or just browse for the right document, the Wiki usage seems pretty artificial. I've written some pages in our Wiki but I can't think of a situation where I'll actually think about looking there for answers.
That's why I'm trying to make the trainee to document everything he learns in the Wiki, this actually achieves some goals, first, as a newbie he has a better sense for what should be documented, second that's a good way to create a sort of a "training Wiki" and third it makes him go over what he have learned - everybody's in gain.
On the optimistic side, maybe it'll just take time, maybe in several years our Wiki WILL be considered a central source for information.
We'll just have to wait and see.
2 comments:
In few years from now you'll call me to replace you for a few days, while you are in a trip to Eilat. This is when your concurrents won't start. I'll have to options:
1. search "concurrent startup issues" in the sharepoint.
2. call you and ruin your trip.
For your sake, make my search show a Wiki result.
if you're talking about "power to the numbers", maybe you should consider about opening that wiki to the entire intranet?
after all, there's nothing classified about "concurrent startup issues"...
another option is not to call Moshe to replace you, than no one will call you, 'cause you help them anyway.
Post a Comment