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Every few years it seems companies are led to believe that there is a new technology on the horizon that will fundamentally alter the way they conduct business. The process usually begins with a flood of press articles promising the new technology can do everything short of printing money. Around the same time, a few companies start reporting outsized gains in productivity and revenues as a result of having implemented the new technology, usually with the help of upstart vendors.
Next come the management gurus and consultants armed with graphics-laden powerpoint presentations. Smelling the next multi-billion dollar market opportunity, they hastily descend onto corporate campuses and hold court at high tech business confabs. Their main message is that the end is nigh for those businesses that don't incorporate this new technology into their existing processes.
"Adapt or Die!" becomes the mantra of the day for consultants, analysts, and reporters. Their words become the start gun, signaling the time has come for millions of dollars to be spent ripping up legacy systems and replacing them with the next new thing. "Hurry up," they insist, "before the next, next new thing comes along!" This familiar run-up of initial enthusiasm for a new technology, usually followed by a longer period of disillusionment, is what Gartner Group has referred to as the "hype cycle." In accordance with the hype cycle, emerging technologies progress 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 should wait until technologies are safely past the hype stage before adopting them, however this isn ?t always the case. There are dangers associated with both believing and disbelieving the hype. As a result of the Hype Cycle, companies can feel compelled to invest prematurely in a technology because it is being hyped or, conversely, they may ignore a technology just because it is not living up to early expectations. In order to successfully position themselves for the future, companies must be selectively aggressive in identifying those technologies that can have a major impact on their business and invest in them earlier in the Hype Cycle.
Over the past year, no sector would seem to be more over-hyped than so-called social software, specifically those applications that breakdown traditional models of content distribution and allow for greater collaboration among users. Articles about blogs and their brethren, wikis, graced the covers of publications such as Business Week, Fortune and Time. Although much of the initial ink was given to describing the rise of corporate blogging, the recent attention has now turned to wikis.
Wikis are most commonly defined as a type of website that allows a large number of users to add and edit content in a highly collaborative manner. According to Wikipedia, the largest wiki in existence, wikis are "a simplification of the process of creating HTML web pages combined with a system that records each individual change that occurs over time, so that at any time, a page can be reverted to any of its previous states." While many basic wikis focus on allowing people to post and edit simple text, more sophisticated wikis can handle file attachments, video, and even e-mail messages. In addition, some wikis provide a variety of tools that allow the user community to easily monitor the constantly changing state of information on the wiki and discuss the issues that emerge in trying to achieve a general consensus about wiki content.
According to the Gartner Hype Cycle, wikis are just beginning their descent from the crest of the hype wave, coasting into territory where real business value can be recognized.
Quantum Computing
Given the fact that wikis are in this transitional phase, now is the perfect time for organizations to begin assessing the role this technology could play in their businesses. This whitepaper is intended to be a "hype free" discussion about the following topics related to wikis:
- How wikis differ from other corporate technologies
- Practical approaches to assessing the business value of wikis
- Some real world examples of wikis in action
- Thoughts on wiki best practices and implementation
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