Building a new intranet at Janssen-Cilag using a wiki

Nathan Wallace of Janssen-Cilag has written an excellent case study on their wiki adoption, which Bill Ives picked up on the FastForward Blog. Janssen-Cilag is a pharmaceutical research company with employees in Australia and New Zealand, and is one of 250 operating companies of Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey-based maker of pharmaceutical, medical, and personal hygiene products. The case study is very comprehensive – one of the best written and most information-rich case studies I’ve seen yet, and Bill’s post is well worth a read as well as he pulls out some of the salient points.

Here’s what I commented to Bill on his post: “They needed a system where editing is immediate and very simple. It was more important to let people add content rather than worrying about what they shouldn’t do.”

So true – it’s good to hear that an organization is concentrating on the positive and taking an optimistic approach instead of wringing its hands over thoughts of bad things happening.

“…”Knowledge management, previously a big concern, has moved off the agenda for the time being.” That is because knowledge management became a byproduct of using the wiki and not a separate activity.”

Great point – true knowledge management happens when people are able to do it without fighting with the technology and seeing it as a separate activity. It scares me to think of how many organizations have ended up treating it as an after-the-fact burden b/c the tools haven’t made it easy.

This is a great case study – Nathan deserves a lot of credit both for what he’s doing with wikis at Janssen-Cilag, and for sharing this really comprehensive, detailed case study with us all. Bill, thanks for your added input as well!