Victor Odlum's Wiki Report

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Contents 1 Introduction: Wikis 1.1 Wikipedia 1.2 Wikipedia's Success 2 Corporate Wikis 2.1 Suggested Uses For Wikis in The Corporate Workplace 2.2 Real World Application of Wikis 3 Use of A Wiki at an IT Helpdesk 4 Conclusion 5 Notes 6 References 7 Resources

[edit] Introduction: Wikis

Wikis have been around since 1995; however it is only now that they are being recognized for their potential as a powerful collaboration tool. Ward Cunningham defines wiki as “the simplest online database that could possibly work".^[1] The first wiki software was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham as a way to manage the Portland Pattern Repository’s site content. The technology was named after “wiki-wiki”, the Hawaiian word for quick. The first website to be called a wiki was WikiWikiWeb.

Cunningham named WikiWikiWeb that way because he remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so called “Wiki Wiki” shuttle bus line that runs between the airport terminals. Cunningham developed the WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on his company Cunningham and Cunningham’s website c2.com on March 25 1995. The wiki contained various topics and discussions about software engineering. In order to make the exchange of ideas easier, Cunningham started developing the WikiWikiWeb based on the ideas developed in HyperCard stacks ^[2] that he built in the late 1980s.

The WikiWikiWeb played an important historical role in World Wide Web and the Internet. It influenced numerous other online communities including the ever popular Wikipedia. Prior to the introduction of Wikipedia, wikis were unknown out of the circles of software developers. Wikis were popular in the free and open source community, where they were ideal for collaboratively discussing and documenting software. Due to the fact that the early users were specialist, the early software-focused wikis failed to attract widespread public attention (Szybalski, 2005).

[edit] Wikipedia

According toWikipedia,it is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Wikiepedia is the biggest and most well-known wiki being used today. It was also one of the first wikis that appealed to mainstream users as a general reference source rather than a specific knowledge base about a particular project or discipline (Szybalski 2005).

[edit] Wikipedia's Success

Wikipedia's revolutionary approach to wikis led to its success. Wikipedia presented its information in a more user-friendly format and unlike other previous wikis, Wikipedia’s wiki resembled a typical website. The interface was clean and attractive with illustrations and photos unlike the text only content of other wikis at the time.

Wikipedia has a policy that all articles should be written in an encyclopedic tone. To the average user Wikipedia appears to be a bigger more up-to-date version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia’s use of formats and content that is familiar to the average user played a major role in Wikipedia’s success. Early visitors to Wikipedia noticed it as a reference source and only later realized that it was created through collaboration. Another advantage that contributed to Wikipedia’s success is the fact that it allowed collaborative editing on a much wider scale than was previously possible. Wikipedia also allowed online communication outside the rigid chronological structure of message boards and e-mail (Szybalski, 2005).

Since Wikipedia developed a standard for implementing wikis, there have been numerous off springs. Various organizations and industries are now seeing the value of a wiki. Many new contexts for wikis are being developed as wikis’ popularity increases. While the technology is becoming increasingly popular, there are still many wikis that are unsuccessful. This is due to numerous factors. There are also still many organizations that are hesitant to implement the technology. This is due to the fact that wikis require technical ability to implement. There are also concerns over the ability of users having full control over the content. Wikis are also being viewed as impersonal, slow moving and centralized. If wikis are not implemented according to certain guidelines they will be unsuccessful, as we have seen numerous wikis that have failed.

[edit] Corporate Wikis

Wikis are being used in many contexts today. They have come long way from their initial use by software developers. The basic principle of collaboration remains the primary use for wikis, however the purpose of the collaboration is what is constantly changing. Wikis have become very popular in academia. Many professors are using wikis in the classroom to foster collaboration and teamwork. There is also an increase of the use of wikis in libraries and museums. One sector that is increasingly using wikis is the corporate sector.

The corporate world is becoming increasingly aware of the potential of wikis. In the corporate context, wikis have been compared to e-mail in terms of their potential impact on the enterprise (Goodnoe, 2005). The daily process of corporations includes a great amount of collaboration. Wikis are proving to be a flexible easy to implement system for content management and collaboration. The fact that wikis are web based almost eliminates the learning curve.

In the corporate world wikis allow employees to work together on private WebPages in near real time. This allows an organization to be agile and competitive. Wikis can improve internal communication which in turn may lead to faster decision making and a more efficient organization. Wikis are becoming standard in many organizations. Organizations are finding out that their competitors are using wikis and in order to remain competitive they need to reap the benefits of wikis. Most of the literature that exists about wikis shows positive attitudes towards corporate wikis. Some of the benefits to corporations are listed as follows:

• Inexpensive Collaboration (Fitcher, 2005; Goodnoe, 2005; Hof, 2005) - Wikis are a very affordable and sometimes free software.

• Efficient, real-time communication (Conlin, 2005; Shoesmith 2004; Durland, 2004; Kavanagh, 2005) - In “E-mail is so Five Minutes Ago,” Michelle Conlin (2005) discusses how e-mail has begun to waste time instead of saving it. She examined statistics dealing with spam in corporations and explains how businesses are turning to wikis, blogs, and instant messaging for increased productivity.

• Good Public Relations (Brown and Heinrich, 2005; Cone 2005; Trufelman, 2005)- In “What the New Personalized Media Means to You — And Your Business Future,” Brown and Heinrich (2005) discuss how social software tools allow businesses to put a human face on their organization leading to more effective public relations with their clients and customers. Brown and Heinrich point out that these tools allow for businesses to immediately respond when customers have concerns and allow for new ways of communicating with people interested in their business.

• Online archiving (Wagner, 2005) - Christian Wagner (2005) explained that organizational knowledge is often kept in the memories of employees and isn’t formally recorded.He goes on to say that this hasn’t changed much over time. In “Breaking the Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck Through Conversational Knowledge Management” Wagner explores why information doesn’t flow freely within organizations and considers how some of the newer collaborative social software systems might allow for this type of information sharing. Wagner specifically suggests wikis as ideal software for this type of repository. While most of the literature focused on positive trends associated with social software such as archiving, public relations, or internal communication, some of the literature argued that social software has a negative impact for business.

[edit] Suggested Uses For Wikis in The Corporate Workplace

There is an increasing use of wikis in the workplace, in an article titled “5 Uses for a Wiki at Work”, Chris Bogan (2007) lists five popular ways that wikis can be used in the workplace:

• Operations Guides- As fast as you can put down information on what to do in a certain situation at work, it changes. Right? “If the A server goes down, reboot the router.” No… scribble, scribble… Manuals are dead. If I owned a wiki company, I’d sell tee shirts that said “paper is dead.” Wiki-fy your operations manuals (and sure, print them once a month to keep an offline copy, should power go out).

• Water Cooler- In the world of telecommuting, there becomes a need for telecommunity. Throw up an employee-driven wiki page for stuff for sale, outside-of-work events, and other items. It becomes a great way to keep people connected outside of the email stream. (Which is kind of the point of wikis).

• Fact and FAQ Lists- I find wikis are a great way to share all the easy things you need over and over again. For instance, what’s that command that lets you pipe the output of a query right into a MySQL database? Put a line in the wiki showing that info. Did you switch suppliers? Put a reminder on the fact sheet. Want to gather up product resources quickly with links? Wikis are great for it.

• Dashboard- There are better calendering options out there, especially for group projects, but a wiki can be a great FOCUS TOOL for upcoming events. If you’ve got the kind of business that works on deadlines, and on projects, it’s a great way to put a kind of “dashboard” that shows deadlines, things to focus on, and maybe key contacts/resources for that time frame.

• Making Plans- Wikis are excellent ways to build up a project for either inside or outside of work. In the workplace, wikis can be a great place to get the brainstorming down, and then maybe to a second edit before committing the information to a more formal project plan. Wiki as whiteboard, I’m suggesting. I think this makes for a quick way to get lots of ideas thrown together. Imagine gathering around a conference call with everyone working on the same wiki. It’s like getting the whiteboard notes without that extra step of copying. Maybe not as easy as a mind-map, but definitely another way to capture points for planning.

[edit] Real World Application of Wikis

Christian Wagner, Dave Yates and Ann Majchrzak (2006) conducted a survey on corporate wikis. The purpose of the study was to determine how corporate wikis are used, the benefits they create, and the factors that encourage sustained used. They embarked on a survey of coporate wiki users to answer five questions: 1) Are wikis sustainable? 2) Do Wikis create different forms of benefits for their users? 3) What factors affect the benefits that users receive? 4) Are there different types of contributors to wikis? 5) What factors encourage different contributors to contribute?

The researchers conducted interviews and surveys of 168 corporate wiki users to gather information for this research study. They asked about the work activities that wikis were used to support. The most common activities mentioned were as follows:

• Software development (including technical documentation, client approval, issues tracking, internal workflow, quality & process management, software design, reference information, setup information, configurations, specifications, instructions for installing software, listing of software versions used in the company, tracking information on the various software applications used in the organization, application maintenance and operations).

• E-learning (including web design, requirement descriptions, testing, assignments to training).

• Project management (including creation of deliverables, meeting agendas, status reports, “great ideas” saved for later, standards and practices).

• Posting of general information and knowledge management (including vacation schedules, how-tos, personal blogs, corporate information, collaborative pages of resources related to a topic as a complement to formal intranet pages, best practices, innovative methods and processes utilized, corporate polices and procedures, human resource information, guidelines,insurance information, expense reimbursement,timeoff).

• Communities of practice and user groups.

• Ad-hoc collaboration (including creating work product drafts, hashing out ideas, remote collaboration, business brainstorming).

• Tech support (including best practices, customer support information-sharing, local help information with how-tos and best known methods, systems requests for new hardware, email setup, software downloads).

• Marketing and customer relationship management(including tracking interesting marketing trends, collecting data, logging daily lead counts, information on partnerships, notifying users of new features, marketing materials, with some opening up their wikis to selected customers).

• Resource management (enabling users to make claims for usage of shared machines).

• R&D (including product requirements, product information, & commercialization with one reporting that “almost everything relating to R&D is tracked through the wiki”).

[edit] Use of A Wiki at an IT Helpdesk

As wikis gained popularity in the corporate world, their use in IT Departments were inevitable. In this section I will be analyzing the use of a wiki at one particular organization’s helpdesk, The St. Thomas University Office of Information Technology (STUOIT). I will also be referencing an interview that was conducted with the helpdesk manger of OIT Mrs. Melissa Reynoso.

The St. Thomas University Office of Information Technology is an IT department that provides IT solutions as well as support services to the St. Thomas University. The university has about 10,000 faculty, staff and students. STUOIT contains 10 staff members. Their positions range from IT Manager to helpdesk assistant. The mission of STUOIT is to maintain the focus of the operation on a faculty, staff and student centered learning and support environment, and to develop an institution-wide approach that established the role of technology as an enabling mechanism for the achievement of the University’s mission and goals. STUOIT’s goals are described as follows:

• Promote efficient and effective technology improvements that enhance student learning and simplify their interactions with university administrative functions.
• Ensure the seamless integration for all student, faculty and institutional information.
• Promote an accurate, reliable, flexible and easy to use information management systems infrastructure.
• Facilitate intra and inter departmental information sharing and support.
• Ensure system flexibility and growth potential.
• Adopt technologies whenever possible based upon industry standards and the University’s present and future requirements.
• Ensure that the funding, training and support resources are adequate and available to maintain the currency and effectiveness of the technological service.
• Promote multi-purpose and shared allocation of resources and technological services.
• Provide cost effective support services.

From the Interview with STUOIT’s helpdesk Manager, Michelle Reynoso stated that the daily routine of STUOIT involves providing helpdesk support to the faculty staff and students of the St. Thomas University. The helpdesk staff relies on their personal knowledge and skills as well as an operations manual. This manual contains how tos, tutorials and other information relevant to the daily work process of the helpdesk. In previous years this manual was primarily kept as a hard copy that would be updated at the end of the school semester. The updates included changes in the operation of a particular system, or new ways of completing a task.

Mrs. Reynoso stated that sometime last year one of her employees introduced her to the idea of developing a wiki that would house the operations manual. After determining some of the benefitsof making the switch, she gave the order to create a wiki that would house the master copy of the operations manual.

According to Mrs. Reynoso, the process of converting the operations manual into a wiki format took a few months to complete. She had assigned the tasks to some student workers who did part-time work at the helpdesk. The wiki was initially used as knowledge base. The staff entered frequently asked questions and other researched knowledge into the wiki. The search feature that was a part of the wiki made it simple for the staff to query answers to questions or other pertaining information.

As time went by the wiki was used for other tasks at the helpdesk. Mrs. Reynoso stated that staff meetings as well as events were organized and coordinated through use of the wiki. The staff would rsvp through the wiki or make changes to planned events on the wiki. Mrs. Reynoso said that the wiki was able to become a daily part of the helpdesk's operations because she made use of the wiki mandatory in most situations. It wasn't an option for the staff to use the wiki when or if they feel like. In order to complete their daily tasks, the wiki had to be used.

Mrs. Reynoso stated that one of the main benefits of the wiki was the central location of information. Prior to the wiki many documents would end up scattered in various folders on the network. The introduction of the wiki helped solve this particular problem among others. When asked if she was satisfied with the implementation of the wiki, Mrs. Reynoso stated that she was very satisfied and that she is actively seeking alternative uses for their wiki. She is also proposing the use of a wiki for the whole university.

[edit] Conclusion

Although wikis were developed in the mid-nineties, it is only within the last few years that they have become somewhat popular. In the early days of social networking and Web 2.0 there was a 90:9:1 rule. This rule reflected the participatory nature of users. It stated that 90% of users were "lurkers" or peepers who did not participate, 9% participated some times and 1% actively participated.

This rule is changing as social networking becomes a part of our daily Internet routine. It is now becoming normal to participate in online discussions and to contribute to wikis. As participation by the average user increases, it will be easy to implement a tool such as a wiki into a work environment. Users will already be familiar with the tool, therefore reducing the learning curve and the need for intense training.

Only time will determine the impact that wikis will have on the corporate world. Proponents of wikis in the work place call it the next best thing since e-mail, while opponents call it another social hype that will soon be a memory. Wikis are slowly making their way into the corporate world; it will be interesting to see the future applications of wikis.

[edit] Notes

1. ↑ Ward Cunningham's Original Description of Wiki
2. ↑ HyperCard was an application program from Apple Inc. (at the time Apple Computer, Inc.) that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web.

[edit] References

Bogan, C. (2007). 5 Uses For a Wiki at Work

Brown, A., & Heinrich, A. (2005). What the new personalized media means to you -- and your business future. Public Relations Strategist, 11(3), 21-24.

Cone, E. (2005). A sticky wiki. CIO Insight, (54), 17.

Conlin, M. (2005). E-mail is so five minutes ago. Business Week, (3961), 111-112.

Durland, S. (2004). Instant messaging brings risks and rewards. National Underwriter / Life & Health Financial Services, 108(33), 55-57.

Fichter, D. (2005). Intranets, wikis, blikis, and collaborative working. Online, 29(5), 47- 50.

Fichter, D. (2005). The many forms of E-collaboration: Blogs, wikis, portals, groupware, discussion boards, and instant messaging. Online, 29(4), 48-50.

Goodnoe, E. (2005) How To Use Wikis For Business

Hof, R. D. (2005). Teamwork, supercharged. (cover story). Business Week, (3960), 90- 94.

Kavanagh, J. (2005). SMS and IM boost collaborative working. Computer Weekly, , 38- 40.

Pressley, L. (2006). Using Social Software for Business Communication.

Shoesmith, J. (2004). Take a message, now. CA Magazine, 137(2), 41-42.

Szybalski, A. (2005). Why it’s not a wiki world (yet)

Trufelman, L. P. (2005). Consumer-generated media -- challenges and opportunities for public relations. Public Relations Tactics, 12(5), 17-27.

Wagner, C., Yates, D. and Majchrzak, A. (2006). Corporate wiki users: results of a survey

[edit] Resources

• Ward Cunningham's Original Wiki Description- Ward Cunningham who is described as the founder of wikis provides his take on what a wiki is.

• St. Thomas University Office of Technology - This is the helpdesk that is being discussed in my wiki report.

• HP Small Business Wiki Site - This wiki is an example of how HP integrates wikis into their business.

• What You See Is What You Get- It has been suggested many times that wikis should be made solely into "what you see is what you get editors". Hers is an interesting discussion on why that would not work.

• The CEO Guide to Wikis - This is an interesting video that discusses the implementation of wikis in corporations.