Now a survey by Ann Majchrzak , Christian Wagner and Dave Yates underpins what is already known: corporate internal wikis really make a difference.
They make work easier, help organisations to improve its processes, collaborate more effectively and enhance individual people's reputation. Two things in particular help to achieve these benefits: 1) organisations, departments, teams etc. face a new challenge and have to find a solution for a problem - and 2) users who believe in each others expertise and knowledge. Plus another interesting aspect - the older the wikis, the more frequent the accesses, the greater the number of lurkeres, and the greater the number of participants. Nevertheless, it seems to me that IT people's firm belief in content management systems and e-mail is still unbroken.
smarter, simpler, social
by Hemma Kocher
This is a Headshift blog post by Hemma Kocher, written on January 19, 2007. It has (1) comments, the latest of which was on January 25, 2007.
The Henley KM Forum is looking at the use of wikis and blogs in organisations. Part of our research is to experiment on ourselves - and working with Headshift we are using a wiki as our main collaboration tool outside of (infrequent!) face-to-face meetings.
We started with a shared commitment, open minds and a reasonable helping of trust - and an empty space, no structure and no rules. The absence of structure and rules was never a problem - in fact I think it's a strength, as it is allowing us to develop our own, at our own speed.
The level and quality of collaboration we're getting through the wiki is head and shoulders above anything I've experienced before in
multi-stakeholder work using other collaboration tools.
Now all we need to do is work out why...