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.)

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)

Enterprises don't need social solutions. ... It seems like every enterprise I work at has almost every gadget imaginable on their intranet: policies and procedures in a wiki, tips and tricks in another wiki, special domain knowledge in yet another wiki, an HR portal, project management apps, help desk apps, integration with email, integration with Office, integration with smart phones, etc., etc., etc. And how much difference does it make? Not much, I would guess.

In my experience, the problems are social (training, culture), but they are attempted to be solved by technical means (installing software). No matter what the tool, it's going to be useless if people don't take the time to learn it or spend time actually using it. An empty wiki is useless, a wiki that only one person has put information into and uses is less than useless, as it wasted the time of that one person, time that could have been better spent using some other, more effective form of communication.

This is why every possible gadget ends up on the intranet: the old method wasn't "working", so a new one is tried. But the reason the old one wasn't working wasn't because of any technical reasons that can be "fixed" with different software. The reason it wasn't working is more often because it was just installed and thrown at the employees figuring they'll know how to use it and will. It's not the tool that matters that much, it's the content, and finding, generating and curating the content is actual work, that isn't tied to the bottom line in an obvious way.

I think it's more of a Your Mileage May Vary situation. Where I work we use MSN, and I imagine they'd prefer Yammer if it were presented to them. We have a call centre that uses social and fun events to lower turnover, and they are looking for a way to allow employees to socialize in a controlled manner during work periods. We also have a sales team that is exploring the idea of social media to communicate with potential clients.

That's three areas that could use some good social software solutions. As opposed to waiting for new social features to be added to Outlook or CRM software, I would think that many enterprises would like to find and use software devoted to social.

(Shameless and obscure plug: that's one reason why our newborn startup is looking at this problem.)

"Enterprises don't need social solutions."

Actually they do, in large global enterprise with thousands or tens of thousands of employees at hundreds of locations worldwide it can be a real problem to locate people with the right expertise to help solve particular problems.

That's presumably why things like SharePoint 2010 have so many "social networking" features built in.