Corporate wiki
From eg
Wiki is not controversial technology. Academics in some fields make extraordinary resources available to the public via wikis, such as UBC "Bibliography of Japanese Dictionaries" http://wiki.elearning.ubc.ca/NicCarter
See corporate intranet, corporate intranet best practice and five levels of intranet for more on how to use corporate wiki technology. See tortoise technology troubles on some of the challenges.
Corporate problems like HR research are no exception. The HR Tests wiki lets professionals exchange tests used in HR HR tests wiki.
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[edit] business use of wiki is mainstream already
"Wikis and RSS are the two Web 2.0 technologies most likely to be adopted, while enterprises are largely not interested in social networking and blogs" - Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption, a Forrester report.
Business adopted more slowly due to a lack of high-level support. "Most people and most companies don't really have a culture of collaboration and never have had one," says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal at CMS Watch, a research firm in Silver Spring, Md. "If you don't have it, all the software in the world won't give you one." However, very collaborative departments in Sony (SNE), Xerox (XRX), Disney (DIS), and Microsoft (MSFT) created wikis that reflected, and in some cases (Intelpedia, Intellipedia, IBM) extended that culture. Almost every example emphasizes the use of wiki to break down internal barriers. Global companies with marketing, research and other operations in different countries are also, obviously, overcoming cultural barriers too. Written language makes collaboration easier and more equal as those unfamiliar with a language can take longer to read and write it.
"If you did a comprehensive survey of Fortune 1,000 companies, you would probably find some sort of wiki in all of them," says Andrew McAfee, a Harvard Business School professor specializing in technology and management operations." Some predict wikis will help to obsolete email [1]. Wikis were one of five technologies (with RFID, social networks, prediction markets and VOIP) to be featured by Business week in a briefing series of "CEO's guide" to inevitable technologies. [2]
[edit] Intelpedia
Intelpedia, within Intel Corporation, is claimed by its founder to be creating such a culture, bringing people together and slicing through a ton of bureaucracy. "People are working on things independent of what they're told to work on... It's connecting people globally." That's the best outcome possible in the wiki world."
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[edit] IBM
IBM assembled a worldwide community of 50 IBM experts in the fields of law, academia, economics, government, and technology" to collaborate "to create a new intellectual-property manifesto that also serves as the foundation of IBM's new patent policy." [4]
[edit] Sony
"Sony's PlayStation team uses a wiki to help keep executives informed about products in various stages of development for the video game console. "The marketing people can get a sense of what's coming their way, as well as the finance and legal people—anyone who needs to know the one-page overview of what's going on,"
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[edit] SAP
"Many companies have "competitive intelligence" groups but...few attempt to proactively know and predict what their competitors will do [or] know how to react to potential competitors' strategies. SAP has a formal program named Apollo (fellow Irregular Jeff Nolan used to run this at SAP, now its Mark Crofton), that analyzes the competitive software landscape. At SAP, they even created an internal wiki that shares the information with the entire organization. "
[6]
Extremely aggressive competitive intelligence has sometimes led to lega issues. Oracle sued SAP alleging SAP had exploited Oracle's customer support forums to gain information on its products and their problems. One of many legal issues with user-generated content.
[edit] US Intelligence agencies
The US intelligence agencies faced significant internal barriers, and some legal ones, to sharing information. Several efforts to breach these barriers failed miserably. Eventually a mediawiki, the same technology as Wikipedia, was installed to enable individual analysts to make individual decisions to share. The result, Intellipedia, has been wildly successful at facilitating information sharing.
However, the original barriers existed for good reason, notably, restrictions on spying on US citizens and avoiding the use of unaccountable and untraced military powers in any civilian investigation.
