Dow Jones

A conversation with Jamie Thingelstad, CTO at Dow Jones Online

Around the world, people turn to The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch.com, Barron's, and other Dow Jones print and digital publications for vital business and financial news and information. Inside the enterprise, Dow Jones employees turn to Confluence to share information and collaborate across distributed business and technical organisations.

You've been using wikis for quite a while at Dow Jones. Why did you choose to deploy one in the first place?

I've evangelized wikis a lot both inside and outside the company because I think they are probably the most under-leveraged tool inside organizations. Here at Dow Jones, the general idea started years ago with a number of our engineers who wanted a wiki for managing content. We chose OpenWiki and put it to work in the technical organization where we knew the lack of rich text WYSIWYG editing wouldn't be an issue.

We were really impressed by the wiki adoption, and how people were using it to document our systems—something we had tried for years and years without much success. What surprised us was the level of adoption by product managers and other people in non-technical roles. It showed us that the wiki could be a great collaboration space where all kinds of users could document, communicate, and share our systems, processes, projects, and ideas. It's the collaborative process—that's really the magic and the power of a wiki.

"It's funny. One of the first things people say when I talk about the wiki is, 'We can't have something out there that just anybody can edit. Just think of what might happen.' And I say, 'Yeah, just think—people might actually collaborate!'"

Jamie Thingelstad, CTO at Dow Jones Online

Why did you switch from OpenWiki to Confluence?

OpenWiki was a dying open source project that wasn't very friendly to non-technical users. It employed traditional textual markup for editing, and the support for attachments was pretty rough. As our usage grew, we needed a solution that made it easy for people to create nice-looking pages, provided more flexibility, and allowed us to scale to the enterprise.

In terms of ease of use, we had three major requirements for the new wiki solution: robust attachment support, search, and WYSIWYG editing. Confluence hits on all those.

We also needed something that could accommodate more enterprise functions around access controls, integration with LDAP for single sign-on, and redundancy across multiple data centers. Confluence does all of those things, too. We used the Confluence API and wrote our own OpenWiki-to-Confluence migrater to bring our content over.

How did you introduce Confluence to your organisation?

We just turned it on. That was one of the things we liked most about Confluence—the online documentation is robust and we felt comfortable giving users an account and letting them run with it.

What kinds of systems and processes are people using the wiki to document and collaborate on?

All of them! We use Confluence to document tons of our software development projects—everything from requirements and use cases to full-blown deployment documentation. It really is used throughout the entire process.

We have engineers using it to document their work and their systems. We have technical leads evangelizing best practices and project managers running projects and communicating scope, status, issues, risks, etc. We also have product managers documenting product requirements and technical teams using it to share charter, contact information, status, and so on.

"It's the collaborative process—that's really the magic and the power of a wiki."

Jamie Thingelstad, CTO at Dow Jones Online

Is Confluence being used in different ways than first expected?

It was originally intended for use by technical teams to document our systems, but now we are using it to communicate and collaborate across groups and divisions. Confluence is becoming the first place for information across our business and technical groups and the expansion is accelerating, growing organically as people find it to be a useful tool.

Have you noticed changes in workflow and culture since deploying Confluence?

Yes. A wide variety of business and technical teams throughout Dow Jones are using Confluence, and they are constantly creating new ways to use it to share information and ideas. Twenty or thirty new pages are created every day because project teams just get together and start working together on something. Some of them may die on the vine very quickly, but that's no big deal. It's extremely common now to see a software development team or project team in a status update meeting where Confluence is up on the projector.

You mentioned access controls as one of your key requirements when choosing a wiki. Why is that an important feature for Dow Jones?

It's funny. One of the first things people say when I talk about the wiki is, "We can't have something out there that just anybody can edit. Just think of what might happen." And I say, "Yeah, just think—people might actually collaborate!" Nonetheless, it's important that Confluence has the ability to restrict editing and viewing privileges by groups or individual users. We find that it's almost never used, but it's a quick way to handle those initial objections. I tell people, "It's not really wiki style, but you can do it and here's how."

Access controls also solve another problem. As we've adopted the wiki more and more, we've had to adapt our auditing procedures appropriately. For example, we store our standard operating procedures and disaster recovery plans in Confluence, so it is covered by our corporate audit processes. In the past we used DocuShare, which has a rigid set of document management audit trail capabilities that nobody liked. With Confluence, we can track revisions and restrict edit rights, which has allowed it to pass audit controls. It's an odd combination, wiki and audit, but it's an important one at Dow Jones.

"Confluence is becoming the first place for information across our business and technical groups and the expansion is accelerating, growing organically as people find it to be a useful tool."

Jamie Thingelstad, CTO at Dow Jones Online

What are some benefits of using Confluence at Dow Jones Online?

The biggest benefits are a central location for all of our diverse information needs, better communication, and real collaboration across groups. How do you measure the true value of people sharing ideas? Another great thing is that, unlike email, Confluence creates permanent records that are easy to follow. When you're in a distributed work environment that becomes a big issue.