Tag Archives: Wikipedia

What You Probably Don’t Know About Wikis


Several of my posts talk about uses of semantic wikis.  In fact, my company is largely based upon a semantic wiki platform, called Symcordia™.  But the more people I talk to, the more I realize that:

  1. While just about everyone has used Wikipedia as a reference source, few people have ever really thought about what a wiki is – what are its strengths and limitations?
  2. When people visit a Wikipedia article, they almost never look at the Talk page associated with that article, and have no idea of the value that may be hidden within the Talk pages, or why they exist.
  3. When people visit a Wikipedia article, they rarely look at the Page Ratings, or rate a page (you can rate Wikipedia pages based on the degree to which it is Trustworthy, Objective, Complete, Well-written.)
  4. Occasionally, I come across someone who says, “I don’t use Wikipedia – the content cannot be trusted!”  (These same people trust network television news!)

What is a Wiki?

Here’s a nice little video that describes the basics of a wiki:

Wikis – More Than Just Knowledge Capture!

If you look beyond the basic encyclopedia article in Wikipedia and examine a typical Talk Page, you will find it provides a place for people knowledgeable and passionate about a topic to debate that topic and how best to present it to readers.  Similarly, it provides a place for those with knowledge of Wikipedia’s standards and editorial policies to ensure an article meets quality and integrity standards.

If you look at the Page Ratings (not all pages have these – this is a fairly recent feature and is being expanded in functionality) you will find a place to rate a page based upon its trustworthiness, objectivity, completeness and clarity.  Perhaps, even more importantly, you can see how others have rated it.

Why Semantic Wikis?

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia – a compendium of articles.  As such, it deals with a single class of knowledge – the encyclopedia article.  For most organizations (for example, a business or an IT group) there will be dozens of different classes of knowledge to organize and represent.  For example, the diagram below is a simplified entity-relationship model for the knowledge inherent in a typical IT organization.  It comprises entities such as processes, services, metrics, roles, competencies, and so on, and shows the relationships among them.  So you know, for example, that if you are going to define a new process, you will need to define roles needed by that process, and if you are going to define roles, you need to define the competencies needed to fill a given role.

A semantic wiki lets you assign semantic properties to a page to reflect these different knowledge classes.  It also enables you to have page templates for each class of knowledge content.  This simplifies and encourages knowledge capture and use and ensures consistency within knowledge types.  This helps you to organize the content, and even to differentiate between two types of content:

  1. Content that must be of extremely high integrity (an operational process, say) and therefore the entire organization needs to understand its current state of development and its governance process. This type of content can and should be designed and made consistent in appearance to increase organizational clarity. The ER Model above represents this type content which tends to be at the ‘core’ of IT in most companies and encourages convergent thinking.
  2. Content that is more exploratory in nature (pages for a Community of Practice, say). This type of content doesn’t necessarily have a lot of pre-defined structure or governance in its development. It emerges over time as people brainstorm and collaborate. This type of content is typically at the ‘edge’ of an organization’s processes and encourages divergent thinking.

The graphic above (from Symcordia™, our semantic wiki platform) shows a typical example of the semantic properties of an IT Capability page.  The Property ‘Status’ can be changed, say, from Operational to Proposed to Under Discussion to reflect its current status.  This change can even be automatically controlled by workflow – the act of changing an Operational page, will change the semantic status of that page to Proposed, alert the appropriate page Owner and Governance Entity and move the page through its governance workflow until it reaches Production status.

We use the same screen real estate – the Property Box – to capture and show page ratings.  Again, the fact that each page can be of a different semantic class allows you to easily adjust the ratings questions based upon the page type.  (My post on how my rock band is using a semantic wiki to enable our learning and development illustrates this nicely.)

Is Microsoft’s SharePoint Really a Wiki?

SharePoint is often referred to by those in the know as a WINO – Wiki In Name Only.  For a rich discussion on this point, I’ll point you to an informative post by my business partner, Roy Youngman.  The other aspect of SharePoint in practice is that its strengths as a document management system tend to reinforce document-centric behaviors.  A common result, given that “old habits die hard” is that people tend to create and attach Word, PowerPoint and other document types, so the collaborative and “single version of the truth” characteristics of wikis are never realized.

Wikis Versus Document Management

To appreciate the limitations of documents as ways to share and grow knowledge, think about all the servers and disc drives filled with documents that never get shared – that quickly become out-of-date. To quote from another of Roy Youngman’s posts on Why Are Wiki’s in Corporate IT Rare:

The very notion of updating a document is perceived as painful and avoided at all costs by anyone with the expertise to actually make the changes… Every document was originally written to stand alone and few of them rely on one another to create clarity, so they contain many redundant passages; in fact, most of them contradict each other in one way or another and confuse the few people who do read them.”

Wikis mitigate the short-comings of document-orientation. Again, to quote Roy:

The nonlinear nature of a Wiki enables well-factored content, thereby minimizing redundancies and preventing contradictions that confuse people. It also allows people to contribute to whatever area of expertise each person happens to have so everyone is drawn in, not just the elite few. “

That means that Wikis enhance knowledge discovery and improvement, while documents tend to bury knowledge.

Have you experienced the power of a wiki?  Please take a moment to share your thoughts and experiences.

Graphic courtesy of The American

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Do You Really Need an IT Transformation?


I’ve been part of many organizational transformations over 30 years of management consulting.  Most were with IT organizations, many were with HR organizations and some were transformations to global shared services.

I used to be excited by the idea of an organizational transformation.  When a client or prospective client used the word “transformation” I would salivate!  “Them’s fighting words!”

But nowadays, I generally shy away from the “t” word. Here’s why.

The Trouble With Transformation

There are several reasons why I don’t like the word “transformation”:

  • For most of the organization, it can feel demeaning, effectively sending the message, “You aren’t any good and you have to transform!”  That can be a bitter pill to swallow (and is almost always untrue – at least in part.)  Not the best way to enroll people in change!
  • From the perspective of 2012, most people have been part of at least one organizational “transformation,” – it was painful and ultimately failed to deliver on its promises.  Announcing yet another transformation typically elicits the response, “Here we go again!” Organizational transformations tend to promise too much and deliver too little.
  • Transformation implies a journey from current state to a future state by going through some kind of radical (transformational?) change.  Increasingly, organizations that are healthy, effective and growing in capability are in a state of constant change and adaption.  The current state → transformation → future state model no longer applies, so why delude ourselves and confuse everybody about having a transformation?
  • Transformations are highly disruptive. They are disruptive because they assume that someone (or group) knows what the future state will look like – “all we have to do is to transform into that future state from our current state!”

To this last point, the reality is that organizational behavior is way too complex for anyone to “know” what the future state will look like.  Perhaps, way back when, in the days of hierarchical, authoritarian organizations in the early industrial revolution, a determinist approach to operating model design was feasible – especially if you thought you were transforming into a future state that would then be ‘frozen.’  We may well know the characteristics we would like to see in the future state, and the kinds of behaviors we’d like to experience, but exactly how we will get there, and what our Operating Model (processes, roles, rules of engagement, governance, services, metrics, etc.) will look like is far less certain.

I think organizational and operating model design nowadays is more about emergence – point people in the right direction, then get out of their way!  To that end, we need to define that direction:

  1. Outcomes we’d like to see
  2. Capabilities we need to achieve those outcomes
  3. Processes, roles, competencies (i.e., knowledge, skills and behaviors) we need for those capabilities
  4. Management and governance systems

Then we need to:

  1. Over-communicate items 1 through 4 above – engage people in really understanding, co-developing and creating organizational clarity.
  2. Empower them to do what is necessary, make sure they have the right tools and infrastructure and get out of their way.
  3. Enable them with a meaningful way to participate in shaping their future – we have found that a semantic wiki can be a great vehicle to achieve this (see this post and the earlier posts (here and here) in the series).

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

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The Semantic Wiki – Driving IT Organizational Clarity and Performance: Part 2


This is the 2nd in a 3-part post representing the culmination of 5+ years of work for my business partner, Roy Youngman and me.

A Quick Recap

Roy and I had become frustrated with the state of management consulting and the lack of “stickiness” with our consulting work.  In helping clients develop business-IT strategies and realign their IT operating models, the deliverables we would leave behind as the artifacts of the work (usually PowerPoint slides, Word documents, etc.) rarely became part of the client’s organizational fabric.  Another source of frustration was that we’d typically arrive at those deliverables through a series of workshops – usually with the CIO and IT leadership team.  Middle managers and the ‘troops’ who had to bring those strategies and operating models to life often did not get exposure to the work until relatively late in the day.  Because they had not been part of the work, they were slow to understand and embrace it.

As Web 2.0 and social media began to take hold, we started to see and experiment with better ways to help our clients – engaging broader and deeper participation by client staff, and leaving behind a ‘living, breathing’ IT strategy and/or IT operating model, captured as a set of wiki pages developed collaboratively with our clients.  As such, the act of development and deployment became more concurrent.  Defining the IT operating model was part of deploying it, and vice versa.

However, we’d found that IT organizational attempts to improve collaboration and support knowledge management typically met with limited success, and that collaboration tools and platforms deployed by IT were falling short.  While the power and simplicity of wikis were appealing, their ‘one size fits all’ approach was not well suited to supporting an IT operating model.  We closed Part 1 by summarizing the strengths of a wiki, and suggesting that these strengths also create vulnerabilities.

The Proverbial Double-Edged Sword!

A wikis strengths also create vulnerabilities.  For example, the ease with which users can create and edit pages can quickly lead to a chaotic free-for-all, as content becomes subject to the whims of authors and editors, and absent a meaningful underlying structure, pages proliferate.  The lack of review before modifications are accepted can limit the credibility of a given wiki page as a ‘source of truth.’  A process definition, for example, may have been last edited by someone that introduced a serious error – and that error can proliferate as people refer to and use the process with the assumption that the content on the page is valid.

Sites such as Wikipedia mitigate these vulnerabilities through a robust system of editorial administration, oversight and management – enhanced by the ‘law of large numbers.’  In this case, with a sufficiently large universe of editors, the content of any page quickly converges towards a mean, reflecting “the wisdom of the crowd”.  But with an internal wiki – say one used by an IT organization or other shared services function, the law of large numbers does not apply, so without other mechanisms to manage structure and content, the wiki degrades in quality and value over time.

SharePoint as a Common Culprit!

This degradation is commonplace in organizations using Microsoft SharePoint as their collaboration platform.  While typically deployed to support collaboration, the reality quickly scales back to “a place to store documents”, which, in the words of one of my clients, soon degenerates to, “a place to lose documents!”

The other problem with SharePoint is that its strength is also its weakness.  While it is a good document management system, documents in of themselves are rarely the proper end goal of collaboration.  Collaboration is largely about having multiple authors create, evolve and use content, and documents are a poor medium for developing, codifying, and sharing knowledge.  Wikis provide a far more valuable alternative approach.  As my colleague Roy Youngman noted in his blog:

The nonlinear nature of a Wiki enables well-factored content, thereby minimizing redundancies and preventing contradictions that confuse people. It also allows people to contribute to whatever area of expertise each person happens to have so everyone is drawn in, not just the elite few.  A Wiki approach enhances the discovery of knowledge and exposes the subject matter in the greatest need of improvement.  And the improvement is a constant theme – the very heart and soul of a Wiki.”

Semantic Wikis to the Rescue!

But all is not lost, as the world of Web 2.0 gives way to Web 3.0, tapping into the special properties of the Semantic Web, a term first coined by Tim Berners-Lee.  Tim was the inventor of the World Wide Web and is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards.

Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as, “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.”  A Semantic Web goes beyond the traditional web concept of hyperlinked, human-readable web pages by inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other.  This enables automated agents to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users.  As the W3C describes it:

In addition to the classic ‘Web of documents,’ W3C is helping to build a technology stack to support a ‘Web of data,’ the sort of data you find in databases. The ultimate goal of the Web of data is to enable computers to do more useful work and to develop systems that can support trusted interactions over the network.”

In some respects, the Semantic Web is designed to overcome the all too familiar limitations of today’s Web – a proliferation of untrustworthy content that can be hard to navigate and make sense of.  Building on the Semantic Web concept and standards, a Semantic Wiki has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages, thereby capturing the meaning of the data within the wiki.

While traditional wikis have structured text and hyperlinks, a Semantic Wiki captures and identifies information about the data within its pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database.  While conventional wikis provide users a simple means of expressing data and metadata, typically through tagging, Semantic Wikis include additional ways to express semantic declarations.  They are therefore able to understand and display the relationships between pages or other data.   For example, you can declare the underlying semantic properties of an IT Operating Model, such as:

  • Processes require people taking on specific roles
  • Roles point to specific competencies people must have to fill them
  • Competencies comprise specific Knowledge, Skills and Behaviors
  • Metrics define process performance

Having these semantic properties explicitly defined enables wiki governance rules and workflows – for example, someone defining a new process will be prompted to define the associated competencies needed for that process, and an appropriate template can be automatically loaded for defining those competencies, thereby encouraging consistency and quality.  A simple query can highlight roles that are missing, or identify associates who are qualified to fill a given role.

The graphic below shows a partial example of the underlying semantic structure for an IT Operating Model.

Example Semantic Structure for an IT Operating Model

Several wiki platforms offer semantic extensions, including Semantic MediaWiki (which extends MediaWiki, the underlying open source platform that powers Wikipedia) and zAgile’s Wikidsmart extension to Atlassian’s popular and powerful Confluence platform.

In combination with other plug-ins and extensions, such as Page Rating, Social Reputation, Workflow and Task Management, a Semantic Wiki can enable real and meaningful collaboration for IT organizations (or any other environment where collaboration can improve service quality, speed of delivery and organizational clarity.)

I will pick up in the 3rd and final part of this series by discussing the two primary value propositions for an IT organization and how a semantic wiki can provide a single integrated space for enabling these differentiated needs.

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The Semantic Wiki – Driving IT Organizational Clarity and Performance


This will be Part 1 of a 3-part post.  This short series represents the culmination of 5+ years of work (on top of a 40 year career in IT!) for me and my business partner, Roy Youngman.  The series of posts also marks the formal announcement of The Merlyn Group, LLC, a business venture we actually started one year ago, but have been ‘flying below the radar’ while we worked with our initial clients and technology.

A Little Historical Context

Roy and I started working together at Ernst & Young back in the early 1990′s.  About 5 years ago, we both became very frustrated with the state of management consulting.  The main problem we saw was a lack of “stickiness” with our consulting work.

Most of our consulting work was either helping clients develop business-IT strategies, or helping them realign their IT operating models (processes, services, governance, organization, metrics, and so on), often in support of new Business-IT strategies.  Our deliverables typically comprised PowerPoint slides, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.  While these all played an important part of informing and aligning our client teams, the artifacts we’d leave behind rarely became part of their organizational fabric.

This was exacerbated by the fact that we’d typically arrive at those deliverables through a series of workshops – usually with the CIO and IT leadership team.  Middle managers and the ‘troops’ who had to bring those strategies and operating models to life often did not get exposure to the work until relatively late in the day.  Because they had not been part of the work, they were slow to understand and embrace it.

A smaller, but no less important concern was the travel involved in all of this.  Post 9-11, travel costs typically added 20% to the cost of an engagement – good for the airlines and hotels, perhaps, but not good for the client and certainly not good for us.  Time lost commuting and the wear and tear on mind and body took their toll.

Enter “Consulting 2.0″…

As the technologies and sensibilities of Web 2.0 and social media began to take hold, Roy and I started to see a better way to help our clients – a way that would engage broader and deeper participation by client staff at all levels, and that would leave behind a ‘living, breathing’ IT strategy and/or IT operating model, captured as a set of wiki pages.  These pages were developed collaboratively with our clients, so the act of development and deployment essentially became concurrent.  Defining the IT operating model was part of deploying it, and vice versa.

This 3-part series of posts will explain how we did this, and highlight some of our key learnings along the way.

The Unmet Promise of Collaboration

We had observed that IT organizational attempts to improve collaboration, enable knowledge management and drive organizational clarity typically met with limited success.  In our research and consulting work, we’d found that limitations with collaboration tools and platforms deployed by IT were a key factor in these disappointing results and that a ‘one size fits all’ approach was all but doomed to failure.  Some aspects of IT require a highly structured and tightly governed approach to enabling collaboration – process management and continuous process improvement, for example.  Other aspects, such as enterprise architecture and business-IT relationship management work best with a looser and more emergent approach.

The Art and Science of Collaboration

The great news was that a new type of tool was emerging – the Semantic Wiki.  We recognized that a semantic wiki would easily accommodate the complexities inherent in IT Operating Models.  But first, let’s review how wikis came about – and how their strengths can create serious limitations for use in an IT organization.

1995 – The Wiki Is Born!

Wikis have been at the heart of collaboration since Ward Cunningham created the first Wiki, known as WikiWikiWeb in 1995.  Ward and co-author Bo Leuf, in their book The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web, described the essence of the wiki concept as follows:

  • A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
  • A wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
  • A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.

According to Wikipedia, the world’s best-known and largest wiki:

A wiki enables communities to write documents collaboratively, using a simple markup language and a web browser.  A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information. A wiki allows for non-linear, evolving, complex and networked text, argument and interaction.  A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted.”

The Wikis Strengths

The keys to a wiki are:

  1. The ease with which people can collaboratively create, access and edit documents.
  2. The fact that those documents can be hyperlinked to create complex and networked text that allows the reader to navigate both linearly (as with traditional text) and non-linearly (jumping from idea to idea).
  3. The ease with which documents can be searched – with the knowledge that you are always looking at the current and only version of the page.
  4. As an inherently web-based concept, wikis benefit from evolving Web standards and technologies such as browsers, mark-up languages and even the magical world of open source – enabling Wiki users and developers to participate easily in a rapidly growing ecosystem of plug-ins.

The Proverbial Double-Edged Sword!

But these strengths also create vulnerabilities. Join me for Part 2 of this series, where will will look at the weaknesses of a wiki as an enabler of IT collaboration, and how a semantic wiki overcomes those limitations.

Graphic courtesy of Semantic Wikipedia

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The Painful But Rewarding Shift from Documents to Wikis


I posted recently on the question, Can Social Media Significantly Improve the Ways IT Work Is Performed?  The post began to share some of the lessons learned as I continue to work with IT organizations that are pushing into the “social media” age and using tools such as Wikis and Social Networking to drive IT performance improvement.

Document Orientation – The Wikis Greatest Enemy!

My colleague and business partner Roy Youngman posted a while back on the question, “Why are Wikis in Corporate IT Rare?”  In the post he posited that most corporations, especially IT departments, are entrenched in a document-oriented approach as the means for developing, codifying, and sharing knowledge.  Roy made an important point that:

Paradoxically, ‘document-orientation’ is both the main reason why Wikis are rare in the corporate world and the main reason why Wikis are great for the corporate world.”

Wiki Benefits – A Solution to the Shackles of Document-Centricity!

Roy went on to explain that:

The Wiki approach addresses almost all the short-comings of ‘document-orientation’.  The nonlinear nature of a Wiki enables well-factored content, thereby minimizing redundancies and preventing contradictions that confuse people. It also allows people to contribute to whatever area of expertise each person happens to have so everyone is drawn in, not just the elite few.  A Wiki approach enhances the discovery of knowledge and exposes the subject matter in the greatest need of improvement. And the improvement is a constant theme – the very heart and soul of a Wiki.”

From Document to Wiki – Changing Mindsets One Page at a Time!

I’ve been using document-centric tools such as Word and PowerPoint since they first became available in the late 1970′s.  Beyond the simple accessing of Wikipedia, I’ve been actively using Wikis such a MediaWiki and Confluence since 2005.  So I have significant experience both in the traditional world of documents, and the more contemporary world of Wikis.  And I can tell you, the shift from document-centricity to Wikis is non-trivial!  I can also tell, it is HUGELY BENEFICIAL!

Here’s a sampling of the mental hurdles I’ve had to navigate in order to realize the full benefits of a Wiki approach.

When to “Polish” Versus When to “Collaboratively Evolve”?

Historically, when I’ve been creating some kind of deliverable (a Word document Project Charter, or a client project briefing PowerPoint deck for example) I’ve always felt that it has to be polished to a high degree.  Many years ago, a wise and seasoned consultant and mentor advised me to always produce quality documents – both in terms of content and look and feel.  He said, “If it looks shabby and full of typos, how can you expect the client to take it seriously?”  The latter point is not necessarily obvious based on the deliverables I see from many consultants.  As an example, I saw a key deliverable produced by a large consulting firm that was full of typos, grammatical and formatting errors.  The final insult was that a PowerPoint slide misspelled the CIO’s name – in a key presentation that was given to the CIO!

By contrast, when I start to create a Wiki page, I feel almost obliged (and grateful!) to start with a much rougher “draft” and look forward to the ensuing “collaborative polishing” that will emerge.  Sounds obvious, but getting comfortable with a “rough draft” as a starting point did not come easily to me until I began to notice that people were less inclined to collaborate on a document if it looked highly polished and “print ready”.  Learning when to “polish” and when to release “draft” material is not always obvious and is very situationally dependent – demanding a keen sensitivity to the specific context for the document.

Structure, Linking, Tagging and Factoring in a Wiki World

I’ve always paid attention to document structure.  I believe I understand the basic principles of good structure, and learned a lot about logical structure from the powerful Minto Pyramid Principle back in the late 1980′s.  But when you get to a Wiki, things change!  The ability to hot-link across “documents” and to external sources in ways that just don’t work in a document-based world (who knows where any given document will be located?) changes the way you think about structure.

Tagging and Folksonomies create another layer of possibilities (and another layer to think about!) that is rarely used effectively in a traditional document environment.  The concept of factoring, well understood (if not always followed!) by programmers, involves structuring content for maximum reusability, minimum redundancy, and ease of search.  These are typically not considerations in a traditional document approach.

One of the many benefits of a Wiki is that it enables an entire collection of ideas and information to be placed into a single, hyper-linked space.  But if that space is a messy structure, the benefits may quickly erode.  If you aren’t a programmer (or, at least, not a good programmer!) you may need access to a Wiki expert for help in thinking through the structuring of a given space – especially if you are using a Wiki that allows for a hierarchical structure among pages.

Does eMail Traffic Really Reduce?

A client I was working with recently was (appropriately!) paranoid about anything that drove up eMail traffic.  When they learned that the Wiki could send eMail notifications about changes, they were immediately hesitant to utilize this feature.  While it’s natural to want to find ways to reduce eMail traffic, we’ve found that there’s an important distinction between “normal” eMails, that come from people and automatic notifications.  The former typically demands time and activity – responding to the email.  The latter is purely and helpfully informational.  Also, if you aren’t finding the information helpful, then turn off the automatic alerts!

The great news for this client, in addition to discovering that automatic informational eMails in the form of Wiki alerts were far less intrusive and demanding than real eMails from people, was that the transition to a Wiki approach dramatically reduced the person-to-person eMail traffic, as the endless cycle of passing documents around was replaced by collaborative editing of a Wiki.

I’ll look at more of these “mindset changes” associated with the shift to Wikis in upcoming posts.

Image courtesy of Westwood K-8 Technology

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