No Rest for the Wiki

The online tools for building collective info banks are making deeper inroads in corporations and rewriting the rules of collaboration

by Rachael King

In late 2005, Intel engineer Josh Bancroft needed a tool that his colleagues could use to share company information, from historical highlights to progress of internal projects. Inspired by Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia assembled by users around the world, he devised Intelpedia, an internal Web site that draws on the input of employees companywide.

Although it ruffled feathers—some employees don't like being edited by colleagues, especially those further down the org chart—Intelpedia caught on. In a little more than a year, Intelpedia has amassed 5,000 pages of content and garnered 13.5 million page views. "Employees can be frustrated that somebody else edited their work," says Jeff Moriarty, collaboration technical architect of Intel's information technology group. "It's a disruptive capability—it shakes things up."

Welcome to the world of corporate wikis. The sites that make it easy for people to add and edit information have revolutionized encyclopedia creation, evidenced by the growth of Wikipedia (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/7/04, "Wikis' Winning Ways"). And though they've been used by corporations for a few years, they're making deeper inroads lately and are gradually rewriting the rules of collaboration at companies as varied as Sony (SNE), Xerox (XRX), Disney (DIS), and Microsoft (MSFT). "If you did a comprehensive survey of Fortune 1,000 companies, you would probably find some sort of wiki in all of them," says Andrew McAfee, a Harvard Business School professor specializing in technology and management operations.

Open to Error

Sony's PlayStation team uses a wiki to help keep executives informed about products in various stages of development for the video game console. "The marketing people can get a sense of what's coming their way, as well as the finance and legal people—anyone who needs to know the one-page overview of what's going on," says Ned Lerner, Sony PlayStation's director of tools & technology. And because the company needs to keep information on unreleased products under wraps, the wiki includes tight security features.

Companies use such protections to avoid the pitfalls suffered by Wikipedia, where entries can easily be changed by virtually anyone and are subject to pranks, vandalism, and libel (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/14/05, "Wikipedia: 'A Work in Progress'"). Just this month, Wikipedia said it would step up efforts to verify contributors' credentials after one frequent contributor lied about being a professor of religion.

A range of enterprise wiki software from Atlassian, Socialtext, CustomerVision, MindTouch, Traction, and others gives companies much-needed security and access control features. In 2004, Sony PlayStation chose Atlassian's Confluence wiki software to help product development teams collaborate with external partners such as video editors, technical writers, and musicians. In addition, the company carefully monitors access and security for each of those wikis.