BusinessWeek published a CEO Guide to Technology today on the increasing role of wikis in large corporations for creating “collective info banks and re-writing the rules of collaboration.” Wikis are seen as a powerful, disruptive technology for re-shaping how employees work together, as well as how they relate to their customers, business partners and suppliers. The list of companies deploying wikis goes on and on, including Motorola, Google, IBM, Disney, Microsoft, Xerox, eBay, Sony and Nokia. Beyond project management and team communications, BusinessWeek finds companies are rolling out wikis for tracking news, posting corporate policies, creating strategy documents and even helping build out ‘sticky’ online communities for better connecting with customers or helping customers better connect with one another.
Manning & Napier is highlighted for the clear business benefits derived from their wiki deployment. The investment-advisory firm uses Socialtext wikis to track industry news.
For Manning & Napier, the benefits of using a wiki were made plain recently amid the debate over universal healthcare… the wiki helped alert employees quickly to a trend affecting the fortunes of many hospitals, helping shape the company’s investment decisions.
“One day there were six articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other places all about this topic,” says Jeff Herrmann, co-director of research at Manning & Napier. “We might not have seen it visually, and we might not have seen it as clearly without the wiki, because we’re all busy and have a lot of things on our minds.”
Other Socialtext customers spotlighted in the BusinessWeek story titled ‘Corporate Wikis Go Viral’ include handset-maker Nokia and investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort. Nokia employed wikis to enable team collaboration and facilitate product design improvements, while also looking to wikis as an alternative to email.
“Today, Nokia estimates at least 20% of its 68,000 employees use wiki pages to update schedules and project status, trade ideas, edit files, and so on.” According to Stephen Johnson, senior manager for Nokia’s corporate strategy, with wiki technology as an enabler for collaborative brainstorming Nokia is finding “some of the most interesting stuff is emerging from within the company itself.”
Another Socialtext user, Dresdner Kleinwort initially deployed wikis for facilitating IT tasks, but quickly found users adopting wikis to save time and increase productivity, while reducing the burden of sending around large files via email. This broad adoption has led to more than 6,000 wiki pages to be created and over a 100,000 hits on the company’s official wiki. Further information about Dresdner Kleinwort and Nokia’s use of wikis can be found in the Socialtext Customer Stories.
The CEO Guide rounds out with a podcast with Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 after writing a HBS Case Study on Dresdner Kleinwort’s use of Socialtext. For reading while listening, see McAfee’s blog.
As expected with new technology (and much like what happened with email and instant messaging when those technologies first appeared in corporate America), end-user education is valuable to help users get comfortable and start adopting new communications and collaboration tools. To help organizations get started with wikis, BusinessWeek offers some interest tips and tricks on proper wiki etiquette. With the rate of wiki adoption, will a Miss Manners primer be next?
Posted by Jeff Brainard
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