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Enterprise 2.0 ... "Large Companies At The Barrier Of How They Can Create New Ideas"

by jonh at 05:48PM (PST) on November 14, 2006 | Permanent Link |

Via Internetnews.com

Please remember that sociology will always trump technology ... I suppose what that means is that if 50% of organizations will be using wikis by 2009, a lot more organizational culture change and work re-definition is coming.

Why Wikis Are Conquering The Enterprise
By Michael Hickins

There used to be just one wiki known to all: Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that embraced user-generated content and its rejection of hierarchy.

Chief among the principles of Wikipedia is that everyone can be an expert.

In its simplest form, a wiki is a Web page that can be edited or created through a browser and linked to other Web pages.

Unlikely as it may seem, wikis are now being adopted by enterprises large and small more quickly than celebrities adopt African orphans.

So much so that Gartner analyst Kathy Harris predicted that by 2009, 50 percent of U.S. companies will be using wikis.

That helps explain why vendors large and small are lining up to provide enterprises with enterprise-ready wiki solutions.

Large outfits, such as IBM (Quote) and Microsoft (Quote) , are wrapping wiki functionality into their real-time collaboration tools, respectively Lotus Sametime and Sharepoint Server.

Smaller vendors like Jotspot, Socialtext, CustomerVision and Klir Technologies are among the vendors offering stand-alone wiki solutions.

Rather than being driven by senior management, however, adoption is coming mainly from project managers and department-level executives.

"In almost every big corporation, some group is already using a wiki," said Andrew McAfee, associate professor of technology and operations management at the Harvard Business School.

One reason is that wikis hold the promise of helping companies stimulate more innovation by their employees.

That's important: 80 percent of CEOs see collaboration as being critical to growth, according to a survey conducted by IBM last March.

Jeff Nolan, the former head of venture capital at enterprise software vendor SAP (Quote), agreed that enterprises are struggling to find ways to stimulate innovation.

"Large enterprises are at the barrier of how they can create new ideas," he told internetnews.com.

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Re: Enterprise 2.0 ... "Large Companies At The Barrier Of How They Can Create New Ideas"

by Paul Reeves on Wed 25 Jul 2007 02:34 PM PDT | Permanent Link

Wikis will become useful tools eventually. But until they are developed by adults who really understand enterprise business processes and data, they just add to organizational confusion. IT depts will adopt them to reduce e-mail overload on expensive systems, but wikis (as many exist now) will generate apathy and confusion because they allow lots of people to create noise (unstructured, disorganized data). When wikis start offering useful templates to enable structured collaboration and user-defined data (tagging, comments, attachments) that results in actionable intelligence, then we can say wikis have conquered something meaningful.

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