Newsday, Melville, N.Y., Change@Work Column: Adding and Editing Content Via Wikis Growing in Popularity at Companies

By Patricia Kitchen, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Feb. 18–Just as employers are figuring out the role of blogs, their value and downside, along come wikis. Actually, wikis have been around for quite some time, but experts say it’s just now that mainstream employers are starting to tap into the power of such Web sites — where users can add and edit content at will — as a means of collecting employee knowledge and enhancing productivity.

Even as the research firm Gartner Inc., based in Stamford, Conn., is predicting that by 2009 half of companies worldwide will be using wikis, employers ranging from investment banks to book publishers to nonprofits are using them in a variety of ways:

As an employee-written, updatable and searchable source of information that might include acronyms and industry terminology, best sales practices, case studies, client information, meeting minutes.

As a human resources site, in some cases replacing the company intranet, providing data on benefits, policies, new-employee orientation material.

As a social-networking site where, through personal pages, employees can learn about their colleagues — what schools, previous employers, and professional and outside interests they share.

Wikis are a subset of the overall move to “mass collaboration,” which includes blogging and social networking, explains Don Tapscott, a Toronto-based technology strategist and co-author of “Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” (Portfolio, $25.95). They are part of the shift, he says, from a hierarchical to a more open management model in which people are called on to “collaborate across old silos.” And that, of course, can bring about feelings of “dislocation and uncertainty” for employees who worry about, among other things, loss of control.

Still, wikis capture, organize and make accessible to everyone in the department or workplace the knowledge that may otherwise exist only with individuals or that gets expressed during water cooler conversations, says Amy Vickers, a strategy consultant with Manhattan-based interactive marketing and technology firm Avenue A/Razorfish. Vickers is helping some clients design and develop workplace wikis.

More then two years ago, a wiki was hatched in the technology department of Bascom Global Internet Services Inc. and has proved to be “a great tool that makes life easier,” says Bob DeRosa, chief technology officer for the Hauppauge-based educational software company.

As people started adding pages, DeRosa says the site became a little “disjointed.” But its 1,288 pages are now organized into 16 main categories, he says, related to such areas as projects, ideas for the future, design documents and brainstorming sessions. And as employees began suggesting documents for posting on the wiki, DeRosa says he’s seen a little “less shouting over the cubes.” The site has proved especially valuable for new employees, he says, to help them get up to speed.

Another plus: Wikis are relatively easy and inexpensive to set up. To do so, many employers are using MediaWiki, the open-source software behind Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia that is written and edited, with a few exceptions, by just about anyone.

Posting and editing procedures are fairly intuitive, and employees can add or update information without sending a request through the circuitous bureaucratic route. The Horn Group, a San Francisco-based communications agency with offices in Manhattan and Braintree, Mass., replaced its intranet with a wiki about a year ago, and it contains information that formerly was static and “buried on file servers” — such as proposals, successful pitch approaches and media contacts, says Gannon Hall, principal.

Of course, even with all the advantages, “harnessing mass collaboration” has its own challenges — not unlike those inherent in managing by the traditional command-and-control style, says Tapscott.

Some employers are concerned about losing control over the site, including the potential for inappropriate material finding its way there. But Vickers points out that those who post information to company wikis won’t be anonymous: Viewers can see the changes, as well as the identities of those who made them. And that transparency greatly lessens the temptation for monkey business.

Also at play is the self-policing principle we see in the blogosphere. In a round-up article of wiki-related research, Elizabeth Albrycht, research chairwoman of the Society for New Communications Research, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank, writes, “A wiki is all about peer review. For example, users have the responsibility for fixing mistakes they find, when they find them.” (See http://www.newcommreview.com/?p=408)

Employers can head off problems by learning more about wiki use, as well as considering these suggestions and observations:

Wikis work best when they bubble up organically. So Vickers says that instead of announcing a corporate-conceived wiki to which all must contribute, it’s wise to see what develops naturally through departments or work groups. Heck, you may already have thriving wikis that are just off the company radar screen.

Be assured that “evangelists” will emerge to encourage and help others learn the process, says Ray Velez, vice president of technology at Avenue A/Razorfish, who developed and oversees that company’s own wiki. It includes a section for material that employees spot and identify as useful on bookmarking sites (such as Digg.com, Del.icio.us.com and Flickr.com) — as well as employee photo and bio pages. (Velez’s includes a photo of him mountain biking.) Also, employees can set up alerts that notify them when material has been added or changed.

Certainly in any workplace, wikis need to be kept secure and behind the company firewall, Velez says. And if there is information that you want to protect from being altered, just upload it as a document file. As for anything that is highly confidential, it’s best just not to post it.

One of the best ways to learn more is to go ahead and test a wiki. Take a look at the wiki at Wikinomics.com, a place that Tapscott set up to encourage and capture conversation related to subjects he treats in his book.

In fact, why not take the advice of Hall, who says he’s had nothing but positive wiki experiences: Just go ahead and “dive right in.”

Next-generation Web

Experts say the Internet will further change the way

people do business. This next generation of enhancements, known in business and technology circles as Web 2.0,

includes social networking sites, wikis, and a key-word

classification system called tagging, all emphasizing “online collaboration and sharing,” according to Wikipedia.com.

Web 2.0 trend

Executives say these are its core elements:

Enables users to easily create content, such as in blogs

Enables social networking on sites like MySpace and LinkedIn

Enables collaborative content creation, as in wikis

How executives think Web 2.0 will affect business

Interactions with customers

How employees interact with one another and their company

The way company is viewed by customers

SOURCE: Survey of more than 500 executives for

Fast Search & Transfer and the Economist Intelligence Unit

wiki (wik-e)

noun: a collaborative Web site that can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet.

Etymology: Wiki wiki means “quick” in Hawaiian. The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in 1995.

SOURCES: American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, wiki.org

Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.

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Copyright (c) 2007, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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