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

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