Wikis
I first became aware of the use of wikis in the enterprise when JP Rangaswami, CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (referenced in the NW article below) was interviewed by Gordon Cook on the subject several months ago, who wrote in the Jan-Feb 2006 issue of the report cookreport.com :
"Rangaswami strikes me as unusual because he is so committed to tearing down barriers to achieve collaboration across divisions. His is an organization founded on human capital and collaboration and rare in the corporate world. He has thrown out standard communication tools. Email is used only one-on-one rather than for one to many. Blogs are used within the bank as one-to-many and wiki’s are for corporate many-to-many use. Rod Hall DRKW’s telco analyst does a public Blog under the DKRW logo. Hall’s corporately sponsored blog is so far unique in the telecom corporate world."
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And from the April 10th issue of Network World:
Enterprise customers make good use of wikis to combat e-mail overload
Socialtext, an enterprise wiki
By Mark Gibbs, Network World, 04/10/06
Mark Gibbs
networkworld.com
E-mail overload is a common corporate phenomenon. Someone makes a single contentious comment or a news item gets everyone fired up and suddenly your e-mail volume quadruples and you find yourself wading through scads of "me too" messages so as not to miss anything.
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A somewhat surprising solution to this problem seems to be the Web-based collaboration systems called "wikis". Wikis are collaborative content management systems of which one of the most famous is WikiPedia, a public wiki-based encyclopedia.
On the topic of wikis, Wikipedia notes that "The first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, is named after the "Wiki Wiki" line of Chance RT-52 buses in Honolulu International Airport, Hawaii. It was created in 1994 and installed on the Web in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who also created the Portland Pattern Repository."
Inside organizations, wikis are becoming more common not only because they appear to help with the e-mail overload problem - a Business Week article quoted investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein's CIO as estimating that adoption of a wiki reduced project-related e-mail by 75% and cut meeting times in half.
Socialtext, the wiki adopted by Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein to replace its existing intranet for 7,000 global employees, is a great example of a wiki designed for enterprise operation.
Socialtext provides the infrastructure for not only collaboration but also for blogging, integrates with e-mail and instant messaging services, provides search facilities with tagging, and includes basic content management functions. It can be customized, provides access and basic content workflow management, and uses SSL along with a comprehensive user rights management system that can be integrated with corporate Active Directory and LDAP systems.
There are three deployments of Socialtext currently available: Socialtext Enterprise designed for user populations of up to 50,000 is based on a dedicated appliance; Socialtext Professional, a hosted solution suitable for up to 500 people; and Socialtext Personal, available on the hosted service for up to 5 people for free.
Pricing for the Enterprise version is on application, while the Professional version starts at $95 per month for up to 19 users.
Socialtext already makes some components available as open source (a Web editor and a wiki anti-spam subsystem) and a full version of the Socialtext wiki code with an open API is planned for later this year.
Socialtext has some impressive customer wins including Nokia, Kodak, and the previously mentioned Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.
Researching the background of wiki use, including the customers of Socialtext, indicates that like all new ways to improve on existing services introducing wikis requires a carefully managed rollout and some real effort at user training and reorientation. For example, a group of heavy e-mail users is going to be hard to migrate to a wiki without serious "re-education."
As always, the golden rule to ensure cost effective implementation of new strategic IT solutions is incremental, instrumented deployment within functional groups. Get that right and the world, or at least the wiki, is yours. |
