Internal wikis are a great way to facilitate collaboration in an organization and to share knowledge across a broad employee audience. Because the software is easy to use, wikis provide a convenient way to tap into the subject-matter experts in your organization and empower these employees to create and maintain useful content for your intranet.

Here are some potential internal wiki uses:

• Keep a running list of team processes. This could facilitate continuous improvement.
• Post glossaries of industry terms and allow technical experts to update.
• Post your internal style guide.
• Post Policies & Procedures.
• Post ideas that require input from a lot of people.

In addition to the obvious advantages of knowledge sharing, the empowering aspects of wikis could be a way to help boost employee engagement in your organization as well.

Is your senior management team apprehensive about allowing employees access to internal social media? Wikis might be a less controversial way than other tools to introduce your company to the idea of social media. Useful content in a wiki could help you to make the business case for such tools to your senior management team.

Information sharing is powerful and expertise and ideas can often times come from unlikely sources. An intranet manager of a large global company once told me “If we only knew, what we know.” Wikis could be a great first step to unlock the unknown knowledge your company possesses.

What ideas for wikis do you have?