Enterprise Adoption: Why wikis aren't like other IT

If you look at adoption patterns at the enteprise level, wikis are an unusual technology.
Most enterprise IT deployments are all about standardization and scale. A purchasing system reduces procurement costs by aggregating purchasing power across business units. A corporate finance system enables aggregation and standardization of accounting ledgers company-wide. An HR system enables standardization and cross-calibration of roles, titles, compensation bands, utilization rates, etc., across the company. The benefits of these systems are all about leveraging enterprise-wide scale benefits of aggregation, standardization, and cross-calibration.

As a result, these systems are almost always implemented top-down. Centralized functions (Purchasing, Finance, HR, etc.) partner with IT to mandate the implementation of these enterprise-wide systems. There's usually a struggle with individual business units, who insist that their needs are unique and Corporate doesn't understand the realities of life in the trenches. These traditional IT systems are implemented when the interests of the overall firm trump the interests of the individual business units.

Wiki as a technology tends to spread very differently across an enterprise. Wikis usually come into an enterprise through local, grassroots efforts. A group tries a wiki, likes it, and starts seeing business value. Other groups get wind of it and try it for themselves. The impetus is bottom-up from the business rather than top-down from the corporate center. It's a very different adoption pattern.

What accounts for the difference? I see three factors.

First, wikis are not a scale play. A single business unit, a single team, even a single person can derive business value from using a wiki. Of course the network effects are exponentially greater at larger scale, but there's a lot of benefit even without the scale.

Second, wikis are not a standardization play. Traditional IT systems are all about trying to limit variation and get everyone to do things the same way (often for good reason). Wikis area all about morphing, molding, and adapting to the way people and groups want to work. So the grassroots appeal is not surprising.

Finally it's difficult to force someone to use a wiki. It's relatively easy to force compliance around a Purchasing, HR, or Finance system: simply mandate usage and take away the alternatives. But the alternative to wikis is email, and who's going to take that away? People will use wikis only if they want to, so the adoption has to come from front-line workers freely choosing the wiki over other alternatives equally available to them.

Addendum 3/29: Since I posted this last night, I realized I overlooked the most obvious way in which wikis are different from traditional enterprise-wide IT deployments: economics. Thanks to SaaS delivery models like Socialtext and open source products, individual departments and business units can implement wikis quickly and cheaply. They don't need enterprise-level IT to get in the game. Over the long run, most companies will benefit from a more holistic approach to wikis, but the economics help explain why in many companies it's the individual business groups who are leading the charge.

Comments

[David]

We are struggling with this right now. We started in my department with a grassroots effort, but as word got out people become involved that want governance models, support plans, and a mandate. I am concerned that without some senior management direction that we will have multiple departments using different technologies and our knowledge will end up like it is today - housed in silos that the rest of the organization can't see or can't enter. Recommendations on keeping the grassroots zeal with a management mandate?

[Mark]

David, I think that if everyone is using the same wiki, growth and learning can be developed as it is organized. If everyone is using different wiki/systems within in your organization, then yes, silos is a strong outcome. If everyone is "playing" in the one wiki at your organization then seeing how it is used will emerge and structure can be implied from that.

[Eric Litman]

There's another piece to the adoption side: wikis, and at a broader scale, departmental or enterprise-wise RSS solutions, can fill the relevance gap increasingly found in the often exceptionally low signal to noise ratio of corporate inboxes. Lacking top-down solutions -- and Blackberries are NOT the solution, but rather a big part of the problem -- project teams and workgroups now have low-cost, low-barrier tools they can deploy in search of a Better Way.

At some point, there's value in moving wikis up the strategy chain to get them integrated into other internal systems, but given the significant new user behaviors required to fit them into workflow, establishing their value from the ground up has a far better shot at helping them find organizational permanence than a top-down mandate.