Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
bACkground
ware development, psychology, and sociology.
Throughout this chapter, “platform” refers to the
underlying tool, which could be used in many
settings, and “system” refers to an actual instance,
with content that is specific to an organization.
The chapter draws on the author's experiences
using and contributing to several wiki platforms,
teaching with wikis, and consulting for business,
educational, and governmental organizations seek-
ing to use wikis for KM, as well as experiences
working in global organizations and managing
global virtual teams. In particular, many of the
examples are based on consulting projects. In
the first, referred to below as SalesCom, the
author worked with sales and marketing staff in
a international company to develop a wiki KM
system for product information and marketing
materials, so that SalesCom staff could make
better use of existing materials based on product
line, customer, or geographic region. In the sec-
ond, referred to below as EnginCom, a group of
engineers created a wiki for their own use that
gradually spread across the engineering depart-
ment, and the author reviewed the resulting KM
system and recommended next steps. In the third
example, referred to as ResourceOrg, a group of
faculty (including the author) started a public web
site to share teaching materials.
The remainder of this chapter is organized as
follows. The Background section provides relevant
background on KM, wiki characteristics in gen-
eral, and uses of wikis for collaboration and KM.
The Challenges section presents some of the key
challenges in using wikis for collaboration and
KM, grouped into several categories. The Best
Practices section identifies and discusses best
practices for initiating and sustaining wiki-based
systems for collaboration and KM, organized into
several groups. The Future Directions section
describes future directions in wikis and their use
in collaboration and knowledge management,
as well as some implications. The Conclusions
section is followed by lists of references and ad-
ditional reading.
This section provides relevant background on
knowledge management (KM), wiki characteris-
tics in general, and uses of wikis for collaboration
and KM.
knowledge management
Making better and more efficient use of the
knowledge of people in an organization can have
enormous benefits (e.g. O'Dell & Grayson, 1998,
p. 8-9), particularly for knowledge-intensive work,
where professionals often spend 20-25% of their
time trying to find needed information (Koenig,
2001). Our main focus is on collaboration for
knowledge management and information shar-
ing, either within an organization or in a (usually
virtual) community. However, there are other
forms of collaboration, such as collaboration
within a team with a specific objective (usually
project-based).
O'Dell and Grayson (1998) describe how KM
can provide business value in three main areas:
customer relationships, best practices to improve
internal operations, and new product development.
At SalesCom, customer relationships were a major
goal, while EnginCom's KM system supported
engineering operations and new product develop-
ment. The author worked with a third organization
to develop a wiki to manage and review propos-
als for internal development projects in order to
allocate resources more effectively.
Views of KM have changed and evolved
over time (e.g. Snowden, 2002; Figallo & Rhine,
2002). Initially, KM focused on supporting deci-
sion making and business process reengineering
by treating knowledge as a collection of objects
that could be gathered and organized. However, in
the mid-1990s, the emphasis shifted to describing
and sharing knowledge, recognizing an important
distinction between
explicit knowledge
, which is
easily codified, and
tacit knowledge
, which is more
difficult to articulate, but often more valuable. For
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