One of the clear interests for the wiki community is use of the medium within corporations. Christian Wagner presented findings from a survey of 168 participants. This was part of a larger project, and this particular survey (from the Fall 2005) targeted corporate wiki users.
The motivations for participation in a corporate wiki are similar to other wikis in general, except that they are smaller and more often short-lived. Corporate wikis, though, do face two cultural hurdles. First, wikiness implies open authorship and sharing of information. But many corporations don’t want to give away their knowledge. Contributing to a wiki also isn’t considered “work” in the eyes of boss types.
A perceived problem is sustainability, although Christian’s findings indicated that corporate wikis have been around for a long time and therefore can be considered sustainable. There is also a high level of participation, owing greatly to developer motivation, utility and sometimes administrative demand. The recipe for building a wiki community in the corporate environment seems to echo the strategies everywhere else: get people to use it, make visible mistakes to entice simple correction, rely on it as a resource, include good search tools, and otherwise preach the Wiki Way.
Christian’s group found that the participants in the survey were failry experienced wiki users. The technologies used were, in order: Twiki (51), MediaWiki (33), Don’t Know (22), followed by many others that received no more than 6 votes each. The reason Twiki did so well is likely due to the fact that there is a user access rights scheme within that wiki engine that would be appealing to corporate administrators (also, the Twiki community was approached to help complete the survey, so it seems likely that led to an experience bias). 119 of the 168 respondants indicated that they felt a core group of wiki editors existed within their organization; 83 saw themselves in that core group.
Corporate wiki users see the wiki as just one of many tools, using it when new solutions are needed. It helps with organization and makes work easier. Wikis are also perceived as a way to enhance reputation. Regardless of stature within the hierarchical organization, an author with useful information published on the wiki can use that contribution to enhance reputation within the company.
For more information, see WikiSym abstract or download the paper.
2 replies on “Corporate Wikis”
I am starting to write a blog on corporate wikis (http://wikibc.blogspot.com), hence I conducted some research on the topic.
The findings of this survey do not look like really surprising, for wiki in corporate surroundings are still in a first-stage processing age. This implies that they are more likely to be adopted by people already knowledgeable about IT, motivated by new applications, and so on. We could rather accurately describe them as wiki geeks, understood as people who adopt them easily.
The reals challenges which lies in the way of the broad adoption of wikis are of two kinds.
The first and more easily addressable is the formation problem : to get people to use wiki, you have to target the population that does not feel specially comfortable with their use, convince them of the benefits of using wikis, show them their potentialities, and so on.
The second, more malignant one is the enterprise culture. Using wikis effectively implies a shift towards an free-edition mentality, which mean going away from the single-authorship, power distance between managers and their subordinates, etc. A typical hurdle would be a boss fearing to lose either control or authority or both over his employees if they are able to easily communicate and look after solution on a shared space.
A lot of work has still to be made on the topic but this post emphasizes some important aspects of the challenges that arise when thinking about implementing a corporate wiki solution.
I agree with both of those strategies, as they reflect the general issues of wiki media adoption. In the corporate domain, they have nuances that separate adoption from wikis in general.
Most organizations likely to use wiki (of a certain size, dealing with certain knowledge management) are also likely to have IT. The systemic barrier therefore isn’t necessarily having wiki gurus or selling benefit to users so much as selling the same to decision makers … the ones who can quite whimsically pull the plug on any such project. This is perhaps more difficult than general wiki adoption because it relies on underlying support from people who typically are neither technologically comfortable nor direct users of the wiki.
The other big hurdle traditionally is a philosophical one, accepting multi-authored content as the norm. Outside of a corporate environment, this is more problematic than inside because businesses already adopt that kind of collective mentality about worker production (i.e. everyone does the work of the company). Outside the corporation, the world is viewed as proprietary, so collaboration by releasing “company” knowledge is likely to throw up red flags. In that sense, an open wiki protected by a firewall is easy to accept.
Where the problem lies is as you said, with the supervisor who feels territorial or a sense of power loss. Even if they do not negatively contribute content like a troll or vandall might, they sort of become philosophical trolls by attempting to undermine, circumvent or otherwise ignore the benefits of a wiki. That would be an interesting study, imo – trying to equate the negative behaviors of content and philosophy trolls.
Thanks for the comments and the tip on the corporate wiki blog. I’ll add it to my list.