Social Glass

Within my organization we’re working hard to socialize the benefits of socially-oriented collaboration tools and have made great progress with our initiative. But an interesting dilemma has surfaced, and I’ve read about this happening elsewhere too (but I can’t remember where - otherwise I’d link to it). The dilemma revolves around whether an enterprise should focus its energy on promoting a single instance of a collaboration tool (i.e. wiki), or if it should instead embrace wiki federation. The inherent benefit of having everybody use a single instance is, of course, that all collaboration occurs in one spot. This makes it easier to find content and people since there’s only one place to look. From an IT perspective this approach also makes sense as it consolidates governance of the tool and makes it more manageable.

But the “single instance” approach might be more of a utopian ideal. We often talk about having a bottom up, non-sanctioned approach to Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Bottom up often entails disparate groups creating their own collaboration environments for specific needs, and the result is wiki proliferation. And I’m not sure there’s much corporate IT can do to keep this from happening.

So, pragmatically speaking, it makes sense for the enterprise to embrace wiki federation. This can be accomplished through Enterprise Search. Slap a Google Search Appliance or FAST instance inside the firewall, point it to the federated wikis, and we have discoverability across all collaboration tools. This negates the impetus behind moving the enterprise toward a single collaboration tool instance. Of course the challenge here is to keep the search index up to date with all of the new wikis that popup. But that’s why we have IT guys.