Using a corporate Wiki

One of things that has always nagged at me was that departments always had individuals that would horde information; the "kingdom builders". These would be particularly nasty in the Operations areas. Also, if you did hold of their official documents, and you found a problem with the doc, or the system had drifted away from the doc, it was close to impossible to change it yourself.

The epitome of this is the Portal. Portals were all the rage about 3 years ago. Corporate internal portals for the employees were seen as a way to get information to the employees of the company. In reality, it just gave a way for the executives and HR to slam corporate rules at the employees. At the very best, Portals were nice attempts at corporate memory but ended up being an ivory tower of management-approved sanitized libraries. They were a feel-good thing for management, but ended up being close to useless for workers to easily distribute information to other workers.

Enter the Wiki.

Wikis are great to partially address these situations. Documents written in the Wiki can be changed by anyone in the company, in real time, if any discrepancies are apparent. Anyone can create a new document/link. It is a great way to distribute knowledge inside the company, and a great way to maintain corporate memory. I believe that all Intranets should have a Wiki installed. If they don't get immediate traction, leave it there, it will grow into its own in time. At the very least, you will find that Operations will use it almost immediately to store Standard Operating Procedures docs (SOPs).

We use PMWiki. It is based on PHP, and uses rather simplistic Wiki formatting tags. It has some quirks that might force us to look at something else. We might code our own using TurboGears at some point.