Qua’s Social Computing Digest

Our research findings suggest that the following actions can be taken to increase the sustainability and value of a corporate wiki:

(1)  integrate the wiki as one of several important tools in a firm’s IT collaboration architecture,

(2)  understand the wiki rules of conduct and ensure they are monitored and enforced,

(3)  optimize the use of wikis for collaborative knowledge creation across geographically dispersed employees crossing divisional or functional boundaries, so as to gain insights from people not previously connected,

(4)  assign a champion to each wiki, have the champion observe the contributions that people make to the wiki to foster employees who adopt the important shaper role within the wiki,

(5)  recognize that the most difficult barrier to cross in wiki sustainability is to convince people to edit others’ work so ask the champion and managers to help with this,

(6)  recognize that a significant value of wikis comes from embedding small software programs into the wiki that structure repetitive behavior (such as organizing meeting minutes, rolling up project status, or scheduling meetings), so ask wiki participants to keep a watch for repetitive activity to evolve the wiki’s technology, and

(7)  understand wikis are best used in corporate cultures that encourage collaboration. Without an appropriate fit with corporate culture, the technology will be of limited value in sharing knowledge, ideas, and practices.