The home page of Intelpedia, Intel’s corporate wiki.
Other companies should take a page from Intel’s collaborative workspace
Wikis are the poor cousins of social media. Seldom loved, often feared, always unsexy, a wiki is simply a collaborative website that can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. At its heart, a wiki is an online space for building collective info banks. (I’ve created more than a dozen wikis over the years, for Ourmedia, the Traveling Geeks and other organizations.)
In recent years, wiki software has entered the workplace, with companies like Socialtext, Atlassian, CustomerVision, MindTouch and Traction rolling out business-friendly versions, and a good number of Fortune 1000 companies, including Microsoft, Disney, Xerox and Sony, now using wikis. Wikipedia, natch, lists some of the features of enterprise wikis.
Like so many successful projects, this one bubbled up from the bottom, and the idea quickly caught on inside the company. By April 2008, the wiki had grown to about 25,000 pages and received 100 million page views. About 500 changes to the wiki take place each day, and more than 8,700 people have contributed to it.
“In the four-plus years that Intelpedia has been up and running, I have had exactly zero reported instances of an unwanted edit — of someone spamming or vandalizing or doing something inappropriate,” Josh said. I’ve heard the same from other companies, which should allay the fears that some corporate executives still harbor.
What about the traditional corporate culture of locking up information? “By necessity, a lot of sensitive information needs to be controlled,” Josh said. Only information that couldn’t hurt the company if it leaked out to the public could be posted to the wiki.
“We haven’t had an example of sensitive information being shared outside the company,” said Ken Kaplan of corporate communications.
At its outset, there were handfuls of evangelists saying on an almost daily basis, “Hey, we should put this on Intelpedia!” The wiki got covered by Circuit, Intel’s internal online newsletter, which brought in a big influx of users. Josh and some of his colleagues then formed a voluntary group, the Intelpedia Distributed Editors, to help steer the wiki with a mailing list, a weekly meeting and to by helping to “garden” content contributions by newcomers. “No funding or resources from the company has been needed, and it probably never will be,” Josh said.
How Intel employees use Intelpedia
Intelpedia doesn’t serve every business purpose, of course. Wikis are good for knowledge sharing, but other tools — blogs, forums, email, instant messaging — are better for communication and short-term collaboration.
One of most popular pages on Intelpedia is devoted to company and industry acronyms. Another page is devoted to employees providing self-help guidance to Firefox, which Intel’s IT department doesn’t support. But employees quickly got past the idea that only encyclopedia-type articles should be eligible for inclusion, so you’ll see information about the Intel Sailing Club, the Intel Classic Car Collectors Club and neighborhood pickup football games. In recent months, employees have been using Intelpedia to share their Twitter handles, from personal accounts to product and business group accounts.
Intelpedia was built on on MediaWiki, the open-source wiki software that powers Wikipedia. “It’s a world-class wiki platform — easy to set up and amazingly powerful,” Josh said. “Imagine that you could have all the features and functionality that Wikipedia has on your own internal wiki.” Though Intel is a global company, Intelpedia pages are written entirely in English, just as most corporate communications are. A widget installed early last year allows people to embed videos on the wiki.
All in all, Josh deserves kudos for helping to enable collaboration and information sharing across departments and national boundaries.
Production note: I recorded my conversation with Josh and intended to produce it as a podcast, but the files became corrupted in Audacity, so I’m writing this post from notes I took during our call.
Related
• Screenshots of Intelpedia on Flickr
• Intelpedia Grows Up (Intel internal newsletter — PDF)
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Very interesting. I can easily see how useful that could be.
I work at a smaller company–with about 50 employees, and maybe half of those with regular, on-the-clock access to a computer–and I wonder at what level a company would benefit from an internal wiki.
Any ideas?
I do think small businesses will benefit smaller companies. Even a smaller company could benefit from the features. For example, I believe there is a “wiki-history” where businesses can chronicle various past strategies and ongoing ones as well. Details within the organization can be accessed and put to good use.
Perhaps the company can integrate the doc into their main site. Change up the color scheme and design a little bit to match the companies’ style. If a really small company doesn’t have their brand made up perhaps that internal wiki can get the branding ball rolling.
I do think wikis will benefit smaller companies. For example, I believe there is a âwiki-historyâ where businesses can chronicle various past strategies and ongoing ones as well. Details within the organization can be accessed and put to good use.
Perhaps the company can integrate the doc into their main site. Change up the color scheme and design a little bit to match the companiesâ style. If a really small company doesnât have their brand made up perhaps that internal wiki can get the branding ball rolling.
Very interesting case study. Thanks!
I agree with Nisha Deo. Company size does not matter. The wiki can be used by small or large companies.
Have you heard of XWiki? It is at the same time:
– open source
– a professional wiki (classic features + professional features)
– a platform: you can develop applications in the wiki (you need a meeting manager?)
– it manages structured and untructured data
To find out more: http://www.xwiki.com, http://www.xwiki.org, http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Products/Down…
I don't think company size matters but the user base and the smaller subset of editors are very important. Once users start editing over each others changes most will quickly give up and abandon the wiki.
I also find “No fund
Fred, I think you're being overly literal. Josh meant no significant or appreciable amount of resources are needed. As you know, storage is damn cheap these days. :~)
i love our small company's wiki!