Wiki in corporate environment - scenarios (Part 1)

I have identified 5 main areas (scenarios) where wiki can be used in corporate environment in order to create new business value.

• Wiki as a tool for supporting communication and collaboration (a) in a team and (b) in whole organization. Wiki is basically communication and collaboration tool. I believe that wiki can be used to decrease the number of emails within the project team and whole organisation. It is well known that team members or employees in general are overwhelmed with emails. Other important reason why to use wiki instead of email is that when wiki is used all communication is archived centrally and searchable easily. This is especially important during project management, because every decision is traceable.


• Wiki as a tool for supporting the communication and collaboration of the company and its surrounding. Nowadays, we can hear a lot about feedback from customers and its importance. Wiki is an excellent supportive tool for building user community around product. Blogs are often used by employees to write about projects they are involved in. I believe that wiki can be used for similar purpose, but community of customers/user must be involved. However, it might be very difficult to create such community and if the company tries to hard it might became just other marketing effort, which will deter potential community members to become active members of the community.


• Wiki as an intranet. Companies have heavily invested into intranets, but unfortunately the goals were not met - intranet usually became death place and employees do not use it (Gilroy K., Ives B., Preparing for Intranet 2.0.). In my opinion, wiki is an excellent and easy to use tool to run company's intranet. Wiki allows everybody to edit any page or create page on new topic and encourage people to contribute. Since wiki does not incorporate explicit data structure, it is very adaptable and users are not bothered with filling in complex forms which is the case of intranet software.

In this article I have proposed three main areas, where wiki can be used. Next time I will propose last two areas - wiki as a tool for knowledge management and wiki as CMS for web application.