Janssen-Cilag is an Australian pharmaceutical subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. It was using a static HTML site for an intranet. Called InfoDownUnder, it was originally developed in 2001. Some content was out of date and there was no search capability. Trust in the system was low and demand for change was high.

Nathan Wallace, in the CIO at Janssen-Cilag was progessive in his vision and suggested the organization implement a wiki as their intranet. They needed a system where editing is immediate and very simple. It was more important to let people add content rather than worrying about what they shouldn’t do. At any rate, the risk of letting anyone change anything was low, since the wiki provided a complete history of changes so mistakes can be quickly undone. The history would also allow the administration people to hold irresponsible individuals accountable for improper actions.

After a successful pilot, Nathan obtained approval to replace the existing intranet with a wiki. None of the old content was migrated as trust was not high on the old content. They only provided 5 minutes of training on the new system. They selected Confluence by Atlassian and did some customization to increase usability. They wisely did not make a big deal of the new intranet being a wiki. Nathan said that many employees do not know it is a wiki. They just think of it as an easy to use intranet. They called the new system, JCintra and implementation has been as success.

Nathan wrote, “our contributions per month has continued to grow since launch. People are engaging and collaborating more with time, they are not losing steam as you might expect. To drive adoption, we’ve primarily focused on owning the flow of new information. Early on, we established a policy that all announcements must be on JCintra. When necessary, they may be sent via email in addition to posting as news on the Intranet. Today, announcements ranging from major restructures to new babies for employees flow through the news page without clogging up email inboxes.”
He went on to add, “Business information that was previously scattered in email (e.g. Business Planning presentations) is now collected into a permanent, secure online space. We have a growing reference and history of information to build on and make available to newcomers. Knowledge management, previously a big concern, has moved off the agenda for the time being.” That is because knowledge management became a byproduct of using the wiki and not a separate activity.
It is great to see these Enterprise 2.0 success stories continue to accumulate.