Front Lines is a guest viewpoint section offering perspectives on current issues and events from people working on the front lines of Canada's technology industry. Dmitry Buterin is president of Bonasource Inc. in Toronto.
In the past year it seems every business publication has written articles about using "wikis" to share information within the enterprise. But as a business manager (of a tech services business!), I have found these articles exceptionally unhelpful.
- They are vague - are wikis a new way of doing business, a content-management system, or an on-line encyclopaedia? The subject is so new, most writers can't describe it clearly.
- They are impractical, because few writers (or anyone else) have enough hands-on experience with wikis to understand what separates good wikis from bad.
- They are not providing enough context from real-world users, since so few businesses are using wikis yet.
The unhappy result? The fickle media might cut their losses and abandon the wiki trend before it even has a chance to become a useful business tool.
And that's bad, because I think wikis have incredible potential — and not just within the enterprise. By enabling broader information-sharing and ongoing feedback, wikis can link companies with clients and suppliers in discreet project groups that speed up decision-making and reduce the costs of developing new projects and products.
But the media jumped on the topic too soon, when wikis weren't ready for prime time. Wiki software is still at a very early stage, most of it open-source software distributed for free. For the most part, the products are ugly, difficult to use and hard to learn (just like the early days of word processing).
The other problem is that most writers point to Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopaedia, as the best example of a wiki in action. Which confuses most readers, since Wikipedia — although it is a collaboration of multiple users — has almost nothing in common with the use of wikis to manage information flows in business.
I consider myself tech-savvy, but it has taken me a long time to understand how a wiki can be applied in our company. Lured by the media's excitement, I tried more than 30 wiki demos myself. Every time I grew frustrated by their poor design and lack of usability — or by inability to articulate which business problem it was solving for me or which other tools it could replace. There was too much information on the screen, poorly documented features, too many mouse clicks.
Inevitably I would throw my hands in the air and ask, "How can this cumbersome, ugly thing ever help a real business?"
I can only imagine how many early adopters abandoned the search. But our company depends on a flow of information between development staff on two continents and continuous client feedback, and e-mail just doesn't cut it. We had built a custom system, but it was a major distraction to maintain it. I knew we could replace it with a pre-built system.
Finally, we took the plunge with TikiWiki, which had a number of positive reviews. It took our team three months to figure out how to use the program effectively. Again, ascetic design(and downright ugly) and low usability did not help. But eventually we started using it to collaborate on software design and for project management.
But all our attempts to use it more widely — in sales, marketing and administration — proved fruitless. Our software team had to use the program to exchange information and update files. But our non-technical people couldn't get used to it. They would read the documents posted by others, but they wouldn't actively use the system to advance their projects.
So what's the problem with wikis?
