Collaborative Intelligence: Wikis for Business
In today’s top Fortune 500 companies, wikis are becoming thecollaborative tool of choicefor building vast store houses of corporate knowledge. Wikis are relativelyeasy touse and manage,and are surprisingly versatile in their functionality. Innovation and knowledge sharing cut right through typical bureaucratic red tape with amazing speed.Colleagues can communicate as a group much more efficiently without beinghampered by endless strings of meetings, or the literally hundreds ofemails that certain projects seem to breed among all the players involved. Communication can also be more easily facilitated withinon a global scale,utilizing a variety of language translation wikis. The constant creation and evolution of globally shared knowledgecreates a tremendouscatalyst for positive change. Business therefore canbuild and developinnovation at a speedthat simply has never been witnessed before. No longer justlone wolves in an organization, the team comes together taking the power of each member and combining it into a stronger force.
Who are using wikis for business?
According to Business Week’s Rachael King,(2007), one of the early adoptors was Intel.In 2005, Josh Bancroftneeded a way for engineers and staff to easily collaborate on internal projects. His solution was tocreate “Intelpedia”.Intelpedia is nowembraced by and utilized daily by thousands ofengineers and staffwithin the company. “Intelpedia now has amassed 5,000 pages of content and garnered 13.5 million page views. According to King (2007), corporations such as Sony, Xerox, Disney, and Microsoft alsohavebrought in wikis as a new and vitaltool for their business. King cites Andrew Mcafee, a professor at Harvard Business school, “If you did a comprehensive survey of Fortune 1,000 companies, you would probably find some sort of wiki in all of them.”
According to Bancroft (2007), corporate wikis can be used to fill a variety of needs including, “tracking industry news, setting meeting agendas, posting corporate policies, and even creating strategy documents.” Open-source software packages such as MediaWiki, and Twiki allow employees to create their own wikis without having to ask for technical IT help. Bancroft cites Ann Majchrzak and Christian Wagnerin their report for the Society of Information Management, that wikisare used by companies such as Motorola, Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, and Nokia. IBM has successfully implemented their wiki with over 125,000 active users. According to Bancroft (2007), “IBM assembled a worldwide community of 50 IBM experts in the fields of law, academia, economics, government, and technology to collaborate on the wiki. The result of that project is a collaboratively written intellectual-property manifesto that also serves as the foundation of IBM’s new patent policy.”
Wiki Security for Companies
Worried about security, who wouldn’t be? If internal corporate informationwas set free on the Internet, havoc would surely ensue.But, thanks to tighter security features, corporate wikis are less likely to face the pranks or vandalism that Wikipedia faces on a daily basis.Most corporate wikis also utilize intranets, as opposed to the Internet. Enterprise wikis software packages such as Atlassian, Socialtext, CustomerVision, and MindTouch provide the added security and access control features that are needed to keep internal company information private.
What’s next in the evolution of company wikis?
Engaging partners and customers seems to be the next step in the evolution of corporate wikis. For example, according to Bancroft (2007), Microsoft is utilizing a wiki to gather information from it’s partners around the worldwhile developing Visual Studio’s documentation. This not only encourages greater collaboration, but also allows Microsoft to enter into new markets where documentation has been previously hampered by local dialects.
How to handle exponential growth in a wiki
One caveat Bancroft (2007) reveals is that in time wikis can become unwieldy with too much information from too many sources. She cites Majchrzak in stating that there needs to be a “shaper” within the wiki environment, that is someone who helps “synthesize” the information so it is easier to read, more efficient, and therefore more usable by other members of the group.
Let’s finish off with a video by Barry Libert, entitled “7 Rules for Building a Business Community.”
……………………………………………………………………………………
Corporate Wiki Software Solutions
1. Social Text
2. Confluence
3. Blogtronix
4. Clearspace
5. Mindtouch
……………………………………………………………………………………………
Additional Resources:Marshall School of Business:
Corporate Wiki Survey of Users – PDF ……………………………………………………………………………………………
References: King, R. (March, 2007). No rest for the wiki. Retrieved December 23, 2007, from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2007/tc20070312_740461.htm