Wiki

The company as a wiki at Best Buy

April 14, 2009 by Jaap Linssen | 1 Comment

On the blog Elsua I ran into a film made by Best Buy on the way they use social media. What I found interesting about the 4 minute film is that Best Buy use a variety of media and are very clear about the reason why they use the media.

From our experience one of the most important success criteria of implementing social media is having clear vision and intention. Social media very often lead to changes in the way people work (together). The intention therefore needs to be changing patterns and empowering people, not successfully implementing software.

Best buy is using social patforms in 5 different ways:

  1. Blueshirtnation: Their “Myspace” like network that allows workers to connect to each other. They have many stores throughout the country and they find that it improves job satisfaction if employees feel they are part of something larger than just their store.
  2. Watercooler: This online discussion forum is used widely by teams or in stores to spread information quickly and discuss it.
  3. wiki’s empower people to all contribute.
  4. Loop marketplace: is a space employees can post ideas. Other employees discuss and enrich them.
  5. Prediction markets: By trading stocks employees predict future business outcomes. Examples of the outcomes can be sales figures or the completion of projects. This system harnesses the collective knowledge of all employees to help make the best decisions.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_jhLGxH-m4

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Trends and Best Practices in Adopting Web 2.0 in 2008

September 26, 2008 by Bas Kolff | No Comments

Through the blogpost of Bill Ives I got directed to the Awareness report on the Trends and Best Practices in Adopting Web 2.0 in 2008. The results of the survey are not surprising but the overall message is very promising for the adoption of Web 2.0 solutions in the enterprise.

The survey focuses both on using Web 2.0 as external-facing tools as well as internal-facing tools. As an Innovation Consultant working on Enterprise 2.0 projects my interest points toward the internal-facing use of the tools.

It is encouraging to see that the Enterprise 2.0 projects we are working on are getting more widely accepted and appreciated.

For example I have been working on several internal wiki projects, during all of these projects the idea of an external-facing wiki came up. I think that addressing the external community is far more effective when using blogs, social networks or communities, just as the figures in the report show and the following statement also underlines this: “However, only 33 percent of respondents expect to employ wikis on an external-facing community, believing that wikis are of greater benefit to employees than consumers.”

For another client we created and managed a platform to increase innovation within the company. This platform is aimed for the most innovative employees in the company to share their knowledge, improve internal communication, and to connect with each other. The following quote from the report underlines our efforts:

“Organizations working on project with the use of these Web 2.0 technologies will increase knowledge-sharing and employee collaboration (82 percent), improve internal communications (78 percent) and help employees find and help each other (59 percent). Ideally, these applications will improve horizontal and vertical cooperation, provide a convenient platform for knowledge sharing, facilitate closer collaboration between employees, nurture teambuilding and create loyalty to their organization. “

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Using Enterprise 2.0 tools ‘in-the-flow’

January 22, 2008 by Jurjan Huisman | No Comments

Michael Idinopulos has made an interesting distinction between different uses of wikis. According to him wikis fall into two broad categories:

  • In-the-Flow wikis enable people to do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself. These wikis are typically replacing email, virtual team rooms, and project management systems.
  • Above-the-Flow wikis invite users to step out of the daily flow of work and reflect, codify, and share something about what they do. These wikis are typically replacing knowledge management systems (or creating knowledge management systems for the first time).

This is exactly why implementing a wiki for knowledge management purposes is not just a matter of merely implementing the wiki. People do not collaborate very much in above-the-flow ways without an incentive to do so. Therefore it is critical to realize that, as Idinopulos puts it, “the challenge of getting people to use above-the-flow wikis is an above-the-flow thing, not a wiki thing.”

Knowledge management contributions
A knowledge management system can be a very valuable asset for a company and the collaborative input of employees brings the system to an even higher level. Unfortunately contributions to these systems are from an above-the-flow type. Therefore Andrew McAfee proposes the idea to change job definitions to put these kind of contributions in-the-flow. He suggests that at least for some employees their job description could state something like “being helpful at the enterprise level using Enterprise 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, folksonomies, Q&A forums, comments, prediction markets, ratings, etc.” Because companies would truly like their people to spend some portion of the work week looking around, helping others, communicating and using their expertise, etc. Therefore McAfee suggests to put these IT-enabled activities in the flow.

Create support for Enterprise 2.0 tools
Next to this ‘top-down’ approach to stimulate the usage of these type of Enterprise 2.0 tools, it is also important to create fertile ground within the organization itself. To do this a pilot should be started with proponents of the tool. Start a wiki project for example with IT minded employees, since they have no technological barrier to start using the wiki. When the rest of the organization sees what the added value of the wiki is for day-to-day tasks, they will start working with it as well.

Create momentum
McAfee states that to date it has been hard for people to work above and beyond their ‘normal’ jobs. Because doing so typically involved physical displacement – hopping on a plane, going to a meeting, etc. – and so was time consuming, inconvenient, and often costly. A good point he makes is that Enterprise 2.0 technologies greatly lower these barriers to work above and beyond one’s ‘normal’ job. But unfortunately theory does not always equal the perception of the users. Therefore it is important to create momentum for the tool to support its usage. Like stated before this can not be done by simply implementing a tool. To create momentum, organizations could (among others) put participation in job descriptions and start a pilot with proponents of the tool.

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Davenport vs McAfee about Enterprise 2.0

January 18, 2008 by Bas Kolff | No Comments

Last friday Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee had a discussion about enterprise 2.0 hosted by Jim McGee from the FastForward Blog.

The discussion did not hold very much substance. There was a discussion whether the name enterprise 2.0 was relevant or not, which to me is a completely irrelevant discussion. But the two sides (Davenport: contra enterprise 2.0, McAfee: pro enterprise 2.0) are a classic example of the hurdles you have to take when implementing enterprise 2.0 tools in your organisation. Davenport represents the traditional thinking (web 1.0) and McAfee represents the next web (web 2.0). According to Davenport it is a hype, technology has been around for decades and enterprise 2.0 is the wrong name. He agrees with the success of web 2.0 but does not seem to understand the possibilities of enterprise 2.0. He sees the tools that are clustered under the name enterprise 2.0 as tools that have to fight against Sharepoint and others. I do not think this has to be the case, since you can also use enterprise 2.0 tools like a wiki to function as an addition to the tools you already have. It does not always have to replace these systems. Because of the ease of use it is an addition.

Accepting tools from the enterprise 2.0 era is more a cultural issue than a technology acceptance issue. But you do need to have the right tools to facilitate this cultural change! The one depends on the other. Davenport says that they could have achieved the same effect years ago with tools like Sharepoint or Lotus Notes, but why did this never happen? Because these tools did not have the ease of use that the current web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 do have. According to Davenport the possibilities of web 2.0 have been around for about a decade. I think that only the theory of web 2.0 that has been around for a while, but the actual technology and actual working tools have not. This because usability is one of the key factors of the success of web 2.0.

After an hour of discussion I did not learn anything new, but the discussion subject is very current. I think anyone who is trying to implement a web 2.0 tool in their enterprise has encountered the issues Tom Davenport mentioned in this discussion.

To listen to the mp3 of the discussion, click here

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Nuospace preview

October 10, 2007 by Bas Kolff | No Comments

picture-107.JPGNuospace is a new enterprise wiki that will be launched november 15th. Nuospace is actually not only a wiki, but also a very simple and easy-to-use document sharing tool, blogging tool and a discussion forum. The power of Nuospace is that they use simplicity as a starting point. Which makes the site very clear. When you press the add page button you can choose between directory, wiki, discussion or a regular posting page. While in editing mode it has a very simple WYSIWYG editor, which I hope will be expanded with image embedding and easy linking to other pages. Read More

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Rapidwiki review

October 9, 2007 by Bas Kolff | No Comments

picture-106.JPG Customervision has recently launched a new free entry level wiki service called RapidWiki. RapidWiki is a basic version of the enterprise wiki BizWiki. I just received the login for my new RapidWiki site.

On the homepage the menu items are displayed on the left, and there is a What’s new box below the article text. A new page can be easily made by clicking on ‘New Page’ in the menu. To structure your wiki it is possible to categorise the articles. Customervision uses the open source WYSIWYG editor called FCK Editor. This editor is used in a lot of wiki solutions. It works very well and almost looks like Word. Another big advantage of the editor is that it is quite easy to add new buttons with features you develop yourself.

So what distinguishes Customervision’s RapidWiki from other wiki offerings? Some features, like inserting Word documents, are very interesting. However, I didn’t get it to work in my Firefox browser. Another feature is the status of the article which can be private or published. When an article is published it will be visible for the rest of the world, when it is private only logged-in users can view the article.

I think that RapidWiki is a good tool, but compared to other wiki packages I think it has nothing that makes this software exceptional. My first opinion of the wiki was that it looks very basic and not very attractive. The layout of the edit page is not very intuitive, it looks very much like different pieces of software put together. They should hire a designer to make the wiki look better. I also do not really see the advantage of workflows and publishing, a wiki is not a cms, the philosophy is to allow every user to edit and create articles. I do think that the possibility to publish articles is a very easy way to communicate to the outside world, but is this a feature you want to have? Why don’t you use this enterprise wiki for open internal communication within a company and use something else like a blog for external communication?

Customervision offers extensive options to easily integrate the wiki with the company’s existing security infrastructure, including LDAP and Active Directory. Also SSL authentication is provided.

Pros:

  • it has all the basic wiki features
  • extensive usage statistics
  • My Place is a dashboard like place with relevant infomation for the user
  • extensive options to easily integrate the wiki with the company’s existing security infrastructure

Cons:

  • not very intuitive
  • ugly
  • insert word document doesn’t work in firefox/mac
  • Writing a summary and summary of change while editing is in my opinion superfluous
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Wetpaint wiki review

October 3, 2007 by Bas Kolff | 3 Comments

wetpaint Wetpaint is a hosted online wiki. Wetpaint can be found on www.wetpaint.com. This wiki is free to use, and very easy to use. Wetpaint is actually one of the best looking wikis out there. It has all the basic wiki features like WYSIWYG editing, image upload, attachment upload, history, RSS feeds, adding pages and watching of pages. These basic wiki features are complemented with some features like tagging of pages, instantly emailing pages, and the use of templates for pages. There are also some good overview pages.

Read More

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Why Wiki’s Do Work

June 26, 2007 by Jaap Linssen | 9 Comments

Enterprises that are structurally successful in knowledge management and online collaboration have significant competitive advantages. However, chances are slim that you know many of such organizations. Knowledge management and online collaboration just have not gained enough momentum within enterprises. Things seem to be changing though.

Wiki’s successfully overcome a number of traditional knowledge management and online collaboration issues.

According to Wikipedia: “A wiki (sometimes wiki wiki) is a web application designed to allow multiple authors to add, remove, and edit content.”

Strange as it may sound; the main difference between traditional knowledge management platforms and wiki’s is that people are actually using and embracing wiki’s. It is said this is due to user friendliness, great search possibilities, easy linking and the powerful feeling of being an author.

Reasons not heard so often but more relevant for enterprise uses of this technology is that previous Knowledge Management platforms too rigidly dictated work flows and had too much focus on capturing “actual knowledge”. Such knowledge management is not intuitive and often even burdensome for those working with these systems.

Wiki’s on the other hand leave users free to work with them as they please and are easy to use. People themselves define what they store and what information is valuable. People can post their content any way they like. If others think it is incomplete or incorrect, they can edit, remove, or discus it.

Another drawback of previous platforms is their costs. Implementing a typical Knowledge Management platform would be costly, not to mention the resourcing required to set it up and maintain it. The investments in set-up and licensing of wiki’s are small. There is also no need to migrate the old systems to the new platform as simply linking to the content of the old platform makes it searchable. Maintenance on wiki platforms is small compared to the traditional systems. As users work with the knowledge it is maintained automatically.

There is one force that still needs to be overcome. As wiki’s lack formal control mechanisms, management fear the resulting lack of control.

To sum up, wiki technology is making knowledge management and online collaboration work, because people actually use it. This adoption success and the low costs are important reasons that many companies today are looking into starting to use wiki technology on a large scale.

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