A couple of years ago, wikis were all the rage. They were extremely cheap (or free), easy to implement, and a completely unstructured blank canvas. Assuming you were a developer or IT person, you could design and populate your own "department website" in seconds. And thats exactly what happened. The techies pounced all over wikis and built a ton of stuff really fast. They loved the shorthand markup. They loved how easy it was to edit off the same page. It became religious. Time to take notes? Put it in the wiki. Need to build an employee directory? A wiki can do that! Need an answer? Duh, have you checked the wiki?! Techies became wiki apostles. For the first time in eons, they tried to get the rest of us to use the same software they were using. That's why wikis are perhaps the fastest-growth software that enterprises have ever seen besides email.
And the fastest declining.
Wikis have sprung up across enterprises like body hair on Robin Williams. They're a mess. A rat's nest of pages, links, and installations have turned wikis into a disease that companies need to cure. Enterprise adoption-wise, wikis have plateaued and remain guarded by techie teams. Our sales pipeline is stuffed with companies trying to wrangle these goats. A major telecom told me they have over 350 "out-of-control wikis." And based on headhunter calls I've received in the last few months, at least three wiki-centric companies are looking for new CEOs to come save the day. Ironically, it's now developers and IT on the defensive about their software while the business people push for something that makes sense for the whole company.
Before you think I'm slamming wikis, you should know I heavily support them. They are a critical, ongoing part of the social software movement and still very powerful tools for certain use-cases. The idea behind wikis is powerful and the technology itself can be instrumental. Standalone wikis may be going away as the conceptual framework for enterprise-wide collaboration, but they're great for small teams or potentially as software underpinnings. And the best news is that the wiki explosion has created a tremendous appetite and re-examination for new collaboration software. Wikis have been the pink Baskin Robbin's tasting spoon to get this started. And for once, IT isn't standing in the way-they've been downing Rocky Road for a while now. Perhaps it's also the thing that helps transform the IT department into a more consultative role. We'll see.