While offering an easy-to-use collaborative platform for teams to capture and share knowledge about their products, processes, people and projects, enterprise wikis also typically have limitations that have often impeded their wider adoption and usage in the enterprise. Here are 4 key reasons why I believe they often fail to deliver value.
1. Accessibility - You do not have rapid access to precise information. Unless everyone has awareness of the page-hierarchy and the overall content organization scheme, information isn't so readily or intuitively accessible. Wildcard searches maybe the only mechanism for others to find information. If there are multiple wikis (which isn't uncommon) then it becomes even more difficult. They become siloed information stores.
2. Reliability - Content is static and has a tendency to become stale (thus unreliable). Since information or content is primarily user-generated, it tends to be static in nature. Unless someone is taking the responsibility for diligently maintaining this content, it becomes stale and unreliable very quickly.
3. Maintainability - Content is unstructured and thus requires a great deal of manual effort and discipline to keep it current. Cross linking of information across pages typically involves copying and pasting URLs. Integration with content outside of the wiki is also the same process.
4. Integration - Most wikis are supporting mechanisms for integrating widgets into the content - which provides for some limited way of bringing data from other applications. It is not quite the same as integrating information, since it is rarely contextual.
zAgile's Wikidsmart addresses all of the above and more. Easy to create and use templates provide a mechanism for creating and maintaining content. The templates also allow for a way to capture attributes on a page that facilitate automatic and contextual cross-linking and referencing of information across the pages and across wikis. Through its interface with zCALM (zAgile's Knowedge Server), Wikidsmart can also integrate information from any other application. It turns the wiki into an Information Portal.
Wikidsmart is currently available for Atlassian's Confluence Enterprise Wiki. Through upcoming connectors for Atlassian's JIRA, Subversion and CruiseControl, it provides very powerful capability for integrating Software Engineering Projects with Requirements, Test Cases, Tasks, Checkins and Build activities. It can similarly be applied to integrations across applications in other domains.
-Sanjiva, Orinda
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Posted by: Nameform | December 31, 2009 at 11:03 AM