The Simplest Online Database

Think a wiki is only good for small-group collaboration in your organization? Think again.

We’ve been talking with a local nonprofit about their document management needs and how those needs are tied to requirements for accountability. As a nonprofit, they receive money from grantors and use these funds for the production of community-facing projects: media presentations, community events, and the creation and management of infrastructure to support those efforts. As the grantee, they are required to document how that money is spent.

The grantors-often large philanthropic foundations or corporations-have seen their endowments drop significantly with the weak economy. They, understandably, want to ensure solid fiscal accountability and reporting for anything they fund. That means the managers at the nonprofit must be crisp in their ability to explain how funds have been used. They have a financial accounting system and can generate reports showing the departments in which the money was spent. However, there is a need for precise visibility into documentation associated with a project, especially into data that demonstrates the brainstorming and decision-making processes that went into a project. Given these operational requirements, we were surprised to find that the organization’s current information management process relies very heavily on Microsoft Exchange public folders and a Windows file share.

As you might imagine, that system is proving unmanageable.

Through our talks with management about what they needed to document, how those documents need to move through the organization for multi-team input, and how the grantors want to see the information, the tool that has emerged as their first choice for information management organization-wide is a wiki.

It’s important, we think, to acknowledge that this is a far more strategically significant use of a wiki than many of us might imagine. That’s not to say that others aren’t using wikis that way. The U.S. Army field manual, for example, is now being translated into a wiki format to better keep pace with rapidly changing field conditions and practices. But it’s probably more common for a wiki to be thought of as a tool for local, small-team collaboration or document-level collaboration (unstructured knowledge management), rather than a top level, organization-wide strategic management and accountability control tool. Yet this nonprofit feels the wiki is far better suited than traditional document and knowledge management systems.

Why is this? Ward Cunningham, the developer of WikiWikiWeb, the first Wiki software, described a wiki as “the simplest online database that could possibly work.” That simplicity along with the acknowledgment of the wiki as a database is at the heart of what makes a wiki so powerful for this nonprofit:

• There is a low bar for entry both in terms of cost and skill required from users. Many modern wikis have WYSIWYG editing tools that may it very easy for non-technical users to contribute.
• A wiki is not carefully prepared content designed for a presentation. The wiki is designed to invite the user to contribute to creation of content. Thus, in the case of the nonprofit, it allows teams to collaborate, aggregate ideas, and, ultimately, support the brainstorming and project delivery that helps demonstrate how funding is used. If ideas are at the core of the nonprofit’s ability to survey, then the wiki becomes the garden for these ideas.
• Wikis allow users to very easily create links and make associations between topics and keywords on different pages. This is true even if the destination page doesn’t exist and a wiki “stub page” shows the intention to include data in the future. Users at our nonprofit can even continue to link to documents and materials stored on their file share.
• The nonprofit employs many creative people, and if ideas are discarded in the project development process, they’re not lost. Team members can return to view and link to old ideas that may prove useful on later projects. Additionally, many wikis have version control so that if key information is overwritten, administrators can revert to previous versions.
• Wikis are freeform and any member of the organization can contribute to and comment on the project development. This is especially important in giving visibility to management as they talk to project stakeholders and grantors, while also allowing management to ask questions and comment on progress.

Of course, meeting this final need was at the heart of their decision to use a Wiki for project development: management can not only show their stakeholders and grantors what department they allocated funds to, they can show the thinking that went into the process of developing a project. Yes, this meets their need for fiscal accountability. But exposing smart, creative thinking is also likely to increase the likelihood that funding future projects grows out of delivery existing projects. In fact, the nonprofit is already brainstorming about how to take the wiki even further. They’re considering:

• Inclusion of features for rating ideas and content, modules specifically for adding keywords and feedback, and integration of project management add-ons (for example, project status and key performance indicators)
• Making the wiki available on an extranet so that the grantors themselves can contribute to aspects of the creative process
• Making portions of the wiki open, on the internet, to solicit ideas from the broader community and help build momentum to fund projects that matter most to the people likely to benefit from them.

A wiki can and should start simply. And modern wiki solutions will definitely scale to the maturity and sophistication of the organization. But the strength of any wiki solution, the “simplest online database,” resides with way that people are brought together to contribute content, share ideas, and provide the links to other ideas thus helping to build that database. That is at the heart of the wiki’s manageability, is how a very simple tool can occupy a very strategic role in an organization.

Ethan Yarbrough is co-founder and president of Allyis. Ken Efta is co-founder of and a principal consultant at Allyis.