And now… The Wiki

Posted by Jim Stroud

March 14, 2006

One of the reasons I awarded Simon Meth a Post of The Week award was due in part to his prediction on how this was the year of the “recruitment wiki.” I still think that is an interesting concept and one Glenn Gutmacher thought was kinda cool as well. He showed me an article on the subject and I wanted to share, so here it is.

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Wiki Fears

Managers may fear a wiki will disrupt workers and their workflow and prove a distraction from “real” work. Or they look at wikis as a fad that will end up costing time and labor (mostly in the IT department).


(click image for larger view) Angel.com has gone from one wiki hidden under a desk to broader use of Socialtext’s hosted wiki.

That’s why many wikis are launched as tests, often by departments with technically savvy workers or groups with a penchant for experimentation. Some are officially sanctioned, while others sneak in under the radar.

At Nokia, the first wiki was brought in as an experiment by the corporate strategy team without consulting the IT department. “After installing it, we were told that it was probably against company policy,” says Stephen Johnston, a member of the corporate strategy team. IT was concerned about overhead costs, the delegation of control to users, and the passing-fad risk, Johnston says. But the wiki–built on an open-source platform–quickly proved it saved time and effort previously dedicated to the task of distributing and storing corporate intelligence.

Wikis have proliferated within Nokia since the initial test. Johnston says. The company has purchased 200 seats of Socialtext, and four wikis, on both open-source and proprietary platforms, are being used by between 1,000 and 1,500 employees. Because of the wikis’ success, Nokia agreed to fund and support a companywide wiki and a host of other collaborative tools. A technology pro-ject team was established to provide new tools such as wikis within days to business groups, Johnston says.

At Angel.com, a subsidiary of business intelligence company MicroStrategy, the first wiki was brought in by a member of the engineering team as a way to manage customer support tickets. The company ran an open-source wiki called Quickiwiki, which came with the book The Wiki Way by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham.

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Want more? Read: Wikis In The Workplace

Tags: wiki, recruiting, HR, innovation