APQC recently spoke to Rebecca Glassman, senior manager of knowledge management at Opower, about how her organization cleaned up its internal wiki and made it a thriving part of the Opower KM program. Rebecca will deliver a presentation titled “Curating Content: Engaging Wiki Users at Scale” at APQC’s 2014 Knowledge Management Conference being held April 10-11 in Houston, Texas.
APQC: Opower’s internal wiki metrics such as page views, visits, and new pages created suggested the wiki was thriving. Yet information credibility and accessibility became issues for users. What led you to discover these issues?
RG: Our first major sign that something was amiss was the bad wiki buzz. People would start most conversations about the wiki with, “I love the wiki, but…” The “but” was followed by complaints that they couldn’t find what they needed, the search wasn’t working, information was missing, etc. The wiki was still our main system of record, but the volume of complaints was definitely starting to build.
We were concerned that our wiki was starting to get a bad reputation. A reputation is a really hard thing to fix. If we didn’t solve the underlying problems soon, we were going to be fighting an uphill battle to get people to give it a second chance.
APQC: What are some potential problems people should look for as their wikis start to scale up?
RG: In addition to the wiki buzz, you may also see people start hoarding information in other systems of record, requesting new knowledge sharing tools, asking more questions about content that’s already on the wiki, and making mistakes they didn’t used to make. These are all signs that you may need to address your scaling problems sooner rather than later.
APQC: What was the root causes of your wiki problems at Opower, and what obstacles made it hard for people to interact with the content they needed most on the wiki?
RG: There were three root causes that we uncovered and addressed with our new knowledge base:
- Sustainability. Our old product knowledge base was too hard to maintain. We had to find a framework that would make it easy to add information on new products and maintain the content we already had.
- Accessibility. It was just too hard for people to find what they were looking for. We had to address issues with search and discovery and target content to more specialized roles.
- Credibility. When people found content, there was no way for them to know if it was true. There was not enough to distinguish the content the documentation team maintained in the knowledge base from all the other content on the wiki. We had to take steps to set this content apart.
APQC: Identifying critical knowledge can be so important to a successful internal wiki. What was the key for Opower to identify critical knowledge?
RG: We did our homework. We performed stakeholder interviews, examined wiki analytics, performed usability testing, started tracking questions about our products to identify trends, and created a detailed knowledge map. All of this research was compiled into a business case we used to get support from management.
APQC: You were able to create 10 times the number of page views, and the landing page is now the fourth most popular page on the wiki (behind the dashboard and main search pages). What makes it work so well?
RG: When we first started the wiki, we tried to maintain a very structured garden with a place for every type of information. Since our wiki was open to the whole company, this started to turn into a jungle over the course of the next couple of years. In the end, the model that worked for us was to model our wiki off a National Park.
Most of the wiki is still a wild and wonderful wilderness where people have the freedom to share and explore, but there’s also an area for the general public (our knowledge base) with trails and labels and a map to highlight the major attractions and make sure you don’t get lost. This new focus on sustainability, accessibility, and credibility has made all the difference.