Building a Better (and Useful) Corporate Intranet Starts With a Wiki

CIO - When Matthew Schultz started at iCrossing in February, a digital marketing firm, he realized his company had a knowledge management challenge. As the company expanded through acquisition, there wasn't a fundamental method or technology to harness institutional knowledge.

"We're adding not only products, but we were growing in people and the knowledge they bring," says Schultz, the company's VP of technology. "We needed a way to put all this knowledge in one location."

The existing corporate intranet was typical: a phone directory, a few uploaded corporate documents, and no way to update it without getting help from the IT department, which was consumed with running critical corporate applications.


Much like intouch wireless' problem seen during the knowledge audit presentation, iCrossing has a primitive and a badly utilized intranet. So to be able to harness the knowledge of the company he decided to move to wiki technology. The company deicided to go with Socialtext, a company that sells wikis to enterprises. Socialtext was the prime choice because there is no need for knowing HTML code, much like this blog site everything is WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). This allows anyone to use this software without much experience in the wiki area. With everyone being able to easily collaborate, the tables have turned from a top down intranet to a bottom up one.