Wiki at Work

This is the second of a three-part series on Web 2.0 at Work.

Do you use a wiki at work? If not, why? Here’s what you are missing.

Before we setup our office wiki anything that was an office policy guide, procedure manual, or what-to-do-in-case-of document was done in Word or Excel and placed out haphazardly on a shared network drive. Finding specific information was sometime an exercise in futility.

We are using Swiki as our wiki platform. Now that we have the wiki, we are putting all of this information out in one location. Each user has a login to the wiki, and we’ve set it up to require a user login to even show the site. A benefit of the user logins is that it stores the modifying user name in the version history.

We have the standard types of information out on the wiki. Everything from a glossary of terms to a full on policy manual. Sure, it took a long time to migrate this content from Word to wiki, but in the end it is in much better shape. Plus, the biggest benefit of all is the ability to search for content in one location, rather than digging through a network share full of Word documents with cryptic names.

How many of you out there have one-of-a-kind jobs? Give yourself the “got hit by a bus” test; “if I got hit by a bus, could someone else do my job?” In other words, are your job functions documented step-by-step? This is total wiki fodder.

On our wiki there is a section titled “What Jason Does” that holds information about how to do my job. I’m not the best at documenting everything, so this is a work in progress, but this is invaluable when I’m out of the office. I know that there have been multiple times when I was either at a satellite campus or on vacation and something I normally do needed to get done. Another director in the office hopped on the wiki, looked up the necessary instructions, and was able to complete the task. A side benefit of this is that people will begin to understand just how complicated and technical your job actually is, and that you aren’t making it up.