One thing we’ve noticed over the past 2 years is that we’re building a solid “read” and “user” community around MIKE2.0 but we don’t have nearly as many contributors.

Whereas this is a common struggle for many wiki communities, it is arguably even a bigger hurdle in MIKE2.0 due to the method based approach. 3 of the biggest reasons why contributions have been difficult are:

• The impression (which is somewhat true) that it is tough to write wiki articles for MIKE2.0 – it’s seen as being kind of like writing a white paper.
• The nature of how people come to the site. The majority of users arrive on MIKE2.0 via search. They came to the site looking for something, not to add something.
• It’s not clear how people should help. Although there are wiki redlinks and stubs, its not immediately obvious – especially if someone has very limited time.

So we’re aiming to get people used to writing a bit at a time and engaged in a manner that allows them to interact better in a transactional fashion (e.g. a simple question or forum post). From this approach, I think we’ll get better results in terms of people writing. You can participate in the forum here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/forum/

We’ve also built a discussion group in linked in.  While there is some overlap in terms of the functionality of these discussions forums – there is definitely value in getting plugged into the 30M members in linked in. You can join this group here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=936087.

We’ll also work on integrating this into our site better in the future.

Enjoy!

Data quality (DQ) and data governance are key topics on the information management agenda at most large organsations. Lots of literature and guidance on how to move data quality forward from a technical, IT-level issue to become a business-owned issue. Once it’s a business-owned issue, organisations can push forward with improvements in the areas that matter most to the bottom line and also top line.

In addition to assets for data quality improvement, MIKE2.0 also offers the IM Quickscan tool . Read here how it helped a real customer raise the profile of data quality within the organisation: http://www.dataqualitypro.com/data-quality-home/how-to-create-a-data-quality-survey-for-your-organisation.html
I feel the QuickScan survey was a great success in gaining insight into the perception of Data Quality within our organization as well as securing more involvement from all concerned parties. Further, the people who participated that were not previously interested in Data Quality seemed to take great interest in the results. Finally, the survey helped cement the business cases for a Data Quality Solution and greater Data Governance.