Ann All wrote a follow-up to my 8 Things You Can Do With an Enterprise Wiki that explores the reasons why her firm’s wiki has gotten off to a slow start:

We’ve got a wiki. But I don’t use it, and neither do many other folks in the office. Our production team uses it, mostly as a repository for documents. When I queried one of the more active wiki users, he chalked up the wiki’s relative lack of success to early technical glitches.

So where did we go wrong? Part of the problem, I suspect, was lack of initial promotion. It was pretty much limited to a brief e-mail with log-in details (those didn’t work well at first) and mentions at individual team meetings.

This raises a good point. To be successful, the introduction of a wiki needs much more than a brief mention. It needs, at minimum, a pilot with several teams that serves two purposes:

1. Find and Fix Technical Glitches – Ann mentions login problems and sluggish response when the wiki was first made available to people. A pilot phase would have caught those problems early so they could be fixed without most employees ever having to deal with them.
2. Demonstrate Relevant Uses – The teams involved in the pilot would help define and model wiki uses that can then be shown as examples during the wiki rollout to the rest of the organization. This embeds the right kind of uses throughout the organization, and ensures sustained use of the tool.

I appreciate that Ann shared this experience, because knowing what has caused wiki adoption to stall is a key step in restarting adoption efforts and improving usage.