No Rest for the Wiki

(page 2 of 3)

Reluctant Contributors

Aside from project management, companies use wikis for wide-ranging activities such as tracking industry news, setting meeting agendas, posting corporate policies, and even creating strategy documents. Because there are several freely available open-source software packages like MediaWiki and TWiki, it's easy for employees to start one without even alerting the IT department. TWiki is used by companies such as Motorola (MOT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), and Nokia (NOK), according to a report by Ann Majchrzak and Christian Wagner created for the Society of Information Management.

Even employees convinced of the usefulness of wikis aren't necessarily comfortable with them, especially when their work may be seen and tinkered with by colleagues from across the company. Some companies let employees take a more passive role, for instance with wikis that track industry news or update employees on quickly changing rules and regulations.

Investment-advisory firm Manning & Napier uses a wiki to track news in specific industries, such as life sciences. For Manning & Napier, the benefits of using a wiki were made plain recently amid the debate over universal health care in states such as California and Massachusetts. The wiki helped alert employees quickly to a trend affecting the fortunes of many hospitals, helping shape the company's investment decisions.

Speedy 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."

Similarly, Enel North America has begun to track developments in the U.S. energy market to effectively communicate news with the parent company in Italy. Enel (EN) employs about 56,000 people worldwide and is one of the largest utilities in Europe. It puts a large emphasis on renewable energy. Now instead of collecting news stories in a Word document and e-mailing them to a distribution list, the U.S. subsidiary can post news in a timely manner using wiki software.

"We're able to make decisions quicker," says Ernest Kayinamura, information and communication technology manager at Enel. "The response from business-development managers has been very positive, as this has reduced the amount of time needed for due diligence to close a deal."

Redmond Extends Its Reach

Wikis play a more integral role at IBM (IBM). IBM's WikiCentral, installed about two and a half years ago, has grown to 125,000 users from 10,000 users just a year ago. Given the rising popularity of that tool, it seemed natural to use a wiki last year when IBM wanted to focus on intellectual-property issues.

The company 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.

As employees use wikis internally, the next step for some companies is to create wikis that engage partners and customers. In June, 2006, Microsoft began a wiki for partners who wanted to help with the documentation for Visual Studio, a software development product for computer programmers. That effort has since been moved to Microsoft's main library, which covers more than 500,000 topics.