wikiup

That’s a question that is asked in a lot of places nowadays…. Although Sharepoint once was inspired by wiki’s, there are a lot of differences between enterprise wiki solutions and Sharepoint. First of all, the paradigm is very different. Sharepoint projects are delivered by it-experts and business experts. Wiki’s are structured and filled and rewritten organically by users.

Sharepoint

So I would put Sharepoint up for the 80% most important processes your organisation internally has in common, and optimize the software for productivity and quality around that. For instance, often organisations start with migrating their team and project network drives to Sharepoint and open up a lot of data company wide. The Sharepoint search will help employees find the right documents. Perhaps certain types of projectdocument folders are structured, for instance for each project in different phases. Perhaps the project has a workflow (planned, in action, finished etc.) for which you would like your employees to use that new system.

Wiki

Wiki’s would cater a different challange. How can users do and organise their work which is different from what their collegues do? How can they work effectively on non-core processes organisation wide? For instance, design a little database table with all approved catering companies, and share it with others for party’s? And how can other employees also contribute to that page if they know a good caterer?

That’s the remaining 20 % which you can support by wiki. It’s heterogenous and not directly important to your business. But, in the end, you can make substantial savings with optimizing these processes.

More wiki ahead

After all, a knowledge economy implies less factory-like processes and more innovation and change driven processes. So this 20% could be higher in your case. It is likely to grow in the near future. No wonder that innovative company’s like Motorola, Google and Intel are heavy wiki users. They let their employees decide on their own processes. Motivation and control is done by appropriate (result based) rewarding, getting passionate employees, and good facilities (no personal productivity constraints).

Wiki or Sharepoint

So, in the end the decision is yours to make and would be based on the business needs. Do you need to centralize or decentralize? Know that implementing wiki is about getting users to use it for their own needs and implementing Sharepoint is about getting the right technical fit with the needs of your organisation.
The combination of both is possible but -mind you- not all wiki’s connect to Sharepoint!

Good luck