Gaining adoption of enterprise wikis

A few days ago James Robertson issued a challenge to his fellow bloggers on the FASTForward Blog to publish their 5 tips for gaining adoption of enterprise 2.0 tools at both the organizational and individual level. Jerry Bowles offered his thoughts, as did Mike Gotta, and others. Euan Semple made a very good point about not listening to too many experts and pundits, and doing what makes sense and is sustainable. Going along with Euan’s theme, I have two thoughts to add:
Play the field: One of the greatest things about the new generation of tools is the extremely low barrier to entry. Unlike more traditional content & knowledge management systems, you don’t have to pay a huge sum for software, and then live with your decision. Most enterprise 2.0 software is priced at a level where you don’t have to decide based on what you can afford. You can take advantage of the trials offered by most companies to get a good feel for what’s available, and decide based on which tool feels right for your organization’s needs, culture, and style of work.
Move swiftly and with purpose, but don’t rush it: One of the biggest mistakes an organization can make is to ignore enterprise 2.0 and its value, but an equally dangerous mistake is to rush into things and forget to give people time to adjust to the new ways of working with tools like wikis. It takes time to gather content that’s spread around in disparate places and gradually move it to a wiki, and simultaneously shift existing practices like collaboration over email to wiki based collaboration.