About 6 months ago, our Records, Library and Website Development team decided we should trial a Wiki. This was a new collaboration tool to our organisation and one that came with an already purchased suite of products. The three teams were chosen for the trial as we were already part of a wider team; knew the basics of information management; and on the most part were willing to trial new technologies ( this reason was most important!). Before embarking on an organisational wide implementation of the Wiki, management decided we should start small.
Most staff came under the following groups -
a) knew what a Wiki was, but had never used one
b) had a technical background in the development & admin of a Wiki
c) had no idea what a Wiki was or what it did
The pilot began with a workshop session on the basics - how to login, how to write comments etc and then we were instructed to "play" for about 2 weeks.
After the 2 weeks were up, we had another workshop to discuss the pros/cons/likes/dislikes/potential benefits to the organisation etc.
The following comments were gathered and reported back to management:
* Staff thought the concept was great - the more collaboration in the organisation the better
* Some staff thought that it would be a useful tool for the pilot group however had reservations about opening it up into the not so "technology literate" general population
* Many staff had difficulties making the time to contribute
* The Records team raised questions about the Wiki and its status as a record or not
* Some thought that adding another tool into the mix would just increase the information overload in the organisation
* There would be a large amount of change management involved to implement a tool into an organisation of this size.
Our organisation decided not to go down the Wiki path at this time. However, as we have the software, there is no reason why, it couldn’t be explored in a couple of year’s time.