Wikipatterns

Chapter 3. What's Five Minutes Really Worth?

Geek and Poke (http:/geekandpoke.typepad.com). Courtesy of Oliver Widder. Used with permission.

The chief difference between the wiki and more traditional content management (CM) or knowledge management (KM) systems is structure. Whereas most ECM and KM tools are built with defined structure in the form of processes, workflows, and architectures, the wiki starts off with the minimum possible structure and grows a custom structure based on how each person, team, department, or project uses it.

It's much easier at the outset to "sell" a tool — both in the financial and conceptual sense — that has defined structure, processes, and features because it can be presented as a solution for a specific need. It may do a good job meeting that specific need, but the tool runs into trouble when people inevitably try to apply it to other needs that may be very different from the initial need it was meant to meet. This is often the scenario in enterprises, and one of the main reasons why the promise of KM and CM systems hasn't been fully realized more than a decade after they initially appeared on the scene.

What Happened to Knowledge Management?

In "Whence goeth KM?" Dave Snowden (2006) concludes that knowledge management (KM) is on its way out because it has changed so much since it first appeared in the early 1990s. KM came to prominence at the same time ...