Enterprise wikis for knowledge capture
It's all about capturing knowledge before oldsters retire - retaining intellectual capital and dynamically building a content bank. Mass retirements may be right around the corner and organizations need to find effective ways to prevent devastating knowledge loss.
One Bank exec says he's using the wiki to respond to e-mail questions more efficiently.
"Financial services entities need quick, clear and concise responsiveness to electronic customer inquiries; these cannot take days to be responded to, nor can they build up into a project," he said in an e-mail to the author of the article.
The wiki company doesn't talk about wiki technology, they say, instead they focus on the need to collaborate. The company site's front page does have the word wiki all over it, though - so it's not as if they are hiding anything.
The company says their software (and I'd contend wikis in general) are as easy to use as email and have much of the power of a formal document management system.
An interesting cautionary point: the company emphasizes that enterprise-wide wikis are far less likely to be useful than wikis targeting particular communities of interest in an enterprise. That's true of knowledge management initiatives generally, it's said. It's in the Community of Interest/Practice context that key information is most likely to be findable and shared.
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Ross, though it may be in your financial interest to argue that way, I think your integrity is well established and your experience in the matter deserves a lot of respect. With just a bit of imagination on my part, I can see plenty of reasons why enterprise wikis would be at least as useful as CoP specific ones. Perhaps if search results could be separated to facilitate both context on one hand and serendipity/ cross department collaboration on the other?
Posted at 9:04PM on Apr 27th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick
3. I'd simply point to some Harvard research and a case study on the intranet use case at a bank in London.
http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/enterprise_20_1.html
http://many.corante.com/archives/2005/10/11/intranet_wiki_case_study.php
One thing that is unique about wikis is that they have the ability to provide value at all scales, from a personal wiki as a hypertext notepad to a Wikipedia inside.
Posted at 9:21PM on Apr 27th 2006 by Ross Mayfield
4. Thanks for those links, Ross. Much appreciated.
Posted at 9:23PM on Apr 27th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick
5. I agree with what Ross is saying though I would like to clarify a point about the article that may have been confusing. It was actually the analyst from AMR who made the cautionary point about how widely wikis can be useful within an organization. We know from experience, as does Ross, that wikis can be successful on a company wide scale.
Posted at 12:35PM on Apr 30th 2006 by Brian Keairns









1. That cautionary point is simply untrue when you consider the intranet use case of wikis.
Posted at 8:51PM on Apr 27th 2006 by Ross Mayfield