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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know: wikis were such an enormous productivity boost at my old day job it was difficult to overstate. We had plenty of documentation in Excel files, and that got read pretty much never, for all the hundreds of man months burned up producing it. The wiki was where engineers actually kept the accumulated knowledge that ran the business. (Like the Deep Magic rituals which, when uttered in the presence of a slaughtered chicken under a waning moon, would let you successfully install the software on a production server.)

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Wikis are good for inter-tech communication, awful for collaborating with unwilling non-techies.

At a previous job, wikis made programmers management's markup bitch. We got bug reports like "Edit ${SALES/NOVEMBER} to reflect new figures from Marketing Marc" .. when Marc himself could edit the damn page.

ive had the same experience. i set up a wiki for a large multi mil project for a group of non technical employees, and brought so much additional work on myself (can you edit x page) that in the end it just wasnt worth it. some people just dont understand that they can edit the pages themselves.

I would agree with this - wiki's are an example where collaborative social technologies are far superior to policies and standards which sit stale in PDF's which are updated at maximum once a year are I hardly think "it is a solution looking for a problem". There is a healthy demand for social media tools both inside and outside the workplace. Effective enterprises encourage collaboration and diversity of thinking - especially as workforces are increasingly globalized. Social media tools can be a lot better than the existing collaboration tools such as Sharepoint at doing this. Where I have seen tools like Yammer deployed it is the business users not the technical IT users who are the first to jump on board

"wikis were such an enormous productivity boost at my old day job..."

For whom?

We IT people have a bad habit of thinking that a good solution for us is a good solution for everyone. From my experience in many enterprises, this is usually not the case.

First, a few numbers...

What I've typically experienced in enterprises:

  IT people (programmers, analysts, admins)       -  1%
  indirect people (office, sales, management)     - 10%
  direct people (warehouse, factory, call center) - 89%

So a 1500 employee enterprise may have 15 IT people, 150 indirect people, and 1335 direct people. (The numbers may vary some, but you get the idea.)

In an engineering firm or software house, the engineers and programmers are the direct people, but I don't really think of these types of firms as "enterprise".

Remember, no one earns anything until the direct people do something. Their production absorbs the overhead of everyone else, including IT.

Why do I bring up these numbers? Because I learned from a smart mentor long ago that solving your direct people's problems delivers value magnitudes greater than solving your indirect people's problems. Kinda like Willie Sutton robbing banks because, "That's where the money is." It's strictly a numbers game.

Back to the question at hand: your people, especially your direct people need the right information and direction to get stuff done. Good application software and good management have always been the most effective way of doing this. Sure, gadgets have a place and deliver some value, but they are generally not the solution to enterprise problems.

Like wikis, intranets, and all the rest, social media is just another gadget.

It is probably relevant to both our comments that I previously worked at a software consultancy and probably 60% of our headcount were some flavor of engineer or engineering management.

I agree with the wiki sentiment (also in a software/system engineer heavy environment). The huge thing I see is the massive problem with email. There's just so much information locked up in peoples email it's not even funny. Wikis provide a way to put some information in a public place that, three months later, someone else that started working on the project can now see, without requiring someone to forward the right emails. It's also generally much more easily searchable than a bag of Word docs. Add in version control and things like edit notification and it's really a huge win.

I really hate email in the enterprise these days. I can totally see where tools like Google Wave (R.I.P.) and Basecamp are coming from. Pity it will take most enterprises ten years to start using these tools regularly.

Wikis are better than the roach motel of having everything in Lotus Notes/Outlook. Confluence is better than wikis because non technical users can create their own pages. My point is most employees will use whatever the company standard is - and only in occasional cases can someone effectively change the company standard to something better (e.g. Lotus Notes databases to Confluence)

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