This paper provides a brief overview of Wiki and its emerging importance in the business marketplace. It describes ways in which many major corporations are taking advantage of this new social software to transform their business practices, and lays out a short set of guidelines to consider before implementing your own Wiki solution.
A Short Guide to Wikis
A Project Locker WhitepaperApril 2006
Copyright 2006The contents of this paper contain valuable information which is protected under the copyright laws of the United Statesand by international treaties. All rights in these materials are reserved. No part of this paper may be copied, photocopied,reproduced, transmitted, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form, in whole or in part,without the prior written consent of One Percent Software, LLC.A Short Guide to Wikis
Introduction
Every few years it seems companies are led to believe that there is a newtechnology on the horizon that will fundamentally alter the way they conductbusiness. The process usually begins with a flood of press articles promising thenew technology can do everything short of printing money. Around the sametime, a few companies start reporting outsized gains in productivity and revenuesas a result of having implemented the new technology, usually with the help ofupstart vendors.
Next come the management gurus and consultants armed with graphics-ladenpowerpoint presentations. Smelling the next multi-billion dollar marketopportunity, they hastily descend onto corporate campuses and hold court athigh tech business confabs. Their main message is that the end is nigh forthose businesses that don't incorporate this new technology into their existingprocesses.
"Adapt or Die!" becomes the mantra of the day for consultants, analysts, andreporters. Their words become the start gun, signaling the time has come formillions of dollars to be spent ripping up legacy systems and replacing them withthe next new thing. "Hurry up," they insist, "before the next, next new thingcomes along!"
This familiar run-up of initial enthusiasm for a new technology, usually followedby a longer period of disillusionment, is what Gartner Group has referred to asthe "hype cycle." In accordance with the hype cycle, emerging technologiesprogress through the stages of conception, market over-enthusiasm,disillusionment, and then an eventual understanding of the technologies'relevance and role in a particular market or domain.
One might think that this natural progression suggests that companies shouldwait until technologies are safely past the hype stage before adopting them,however this isn 't always the case. There are dangers associated with bothbelieving and disbelieving the hype. As a result of the Hype Cycle, companiescan feel compelled to invest prematurely in a technology because it is beinghyped or, conversely, they may ignore a technology just because it is not livingup to early expectations. In order to successfully position themselves for thefuture, companies must be selectively aggressive in identifying thosetechnologies that can have a major impact on their business and invest in themearlier in the Hype Cycle.
Over the past year, no sector would seem to be more over-hyped than so-calledsocial software, specifically those applications that breakdown traditional modelsof content distribution and allow for greater collaboration among users. Articlesabout blogs and their brethren, wikis, graced the covers of publications such asBusiness Week, Fortune and Time. Although much of the initial ink was given to
2Copyright 2006 One Percent Software, LLCA Short Guide to Wikis
describing the rise of corporate blogging, the recent attention has now turned towikis.
Wikis are most commonly defined as a type of website that allows a largenumber of users to add and edit content in a highly collaborative manner.According to Wikipedia, the largest wiki in existence, wiki's are "a simplification ofthe process of creating HTML web pages combined with a system that recordseach individual change that occurs over time, so that at any time, a page can bereverted to any of its previous states." While many basic wikis focus on allowingpeople to post and edit simple text, more sophisticated wikis can handle fileattachments, video, and even e-mail messages. In addition, some wikis providea variety of tools that allow the user community to easily monitor the constantlychanging state of information on the wiki and discuss the issues that emerge intrying to achieve a general consensus about wiki content.
According to the Gartner Hype Cycle, wikis are just beginning their descent fromthe crest of the hype wave, coasting into territory where real ... [download for more]
