Wikis in Enterprises Survey – Collaborative Working in Enterprise Environments Using Wikis – First Results Now Available!

3 thoughts on “Wikis in Enterprises Survey – Collaborative Working in Enterprise Environments Using Wikis – First Results Now Available!”

  1. Great to read this long post 🙂

    One goal of the survey is to back some presumptions and concretize them (keeping in mind that the results are not exactly representative). So it was pretty clear to me that the simplicity and the ease of use are important factors for using wikis – and this was proved by the results.

    On the other hand, I was surprised that the “financial reason” factor seems to be rather unimportant in the enterprise sector – regarding the sometimes pretty high costs for expert knowledge management systems. But obviously this “initial expense” is negligible.

    Anyway, keeping the employees motivated to use the wiki really can’t be neglected.

  2. Thanks a lot, Tim, for dropping by and for the feedback comments ! Lots of great input ! Yes, I know what you mean when you mention that the sample may not be representative enough, but I guess it is a good start as the first initial results have proved to be. I agree with you about the simplicity and ease of use and that is why I feel that over time more and more knowledge workers would actually open up to adopting wikis. I can imagine there may well be a learning curve but it is surely not as steep as with other tools and as such I feel that it would be just a matter of time before people starting adopting wikis as second nature. That is how powerful they would become. I am sure. We haven’t reached the tipping point and I am certain that when we do we would be looking a lot different towards collaboration and knowledge sharing within the enterprise.

    Regarding the “financial reason” I think that there is a reason for this, actually, and that is the fact that in most cases most wiki engines are actually not products designed and developed by larger enterprises who already have got very expensive enterprise content management systems, so right now it is becoming something like a second-hand tool. But over time that would change and as it does we would be seeing how that wiki-like culture will sink in within the traditional content management systems and they would eventually be part of them. At that point financials will take a whole new perspective and interest in them will grow exponentially. I am sure.

    Thanks again for the feedback !

  3. Tim, I am not sure what happened with your second set of comments but somehow it looks like WordPress ate them all, so I had to recover them from a notification I got. Here you have got them added below to continue further with the discussion:

    “Apropos learning curve:

    Most probable “non-technical employees” would tend towards using a wiki more often if they have not to worry about the wiki syntax. Some wikis already have WYSIWYG editors, but often (from the technical view point) the parsing and converting of the input is painful.

    I think that this will get much easier with Creole (an attempt to standardize wiki syntax) and a wide support of it.

    Seems to be a little bit like the word processing or the creation of web sites (html) in the past.”

    Yes, I certainly agree with you that although WYSIWYG editors may be already available out there it would be much more interesting to see how there is a standardisation of the wiki syntax so that regardless of the wiki engine we would have the opportunity to make use of them all extensively without having to know, or work with, multiple wiki syntax markups. Thus thanks ever so much for the link to Creole. Very useful and worth while following up on resource, indeed ! Appreciated.

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