Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/59185
The Wiki Factor Do your business students know how to "wiki"? Wiki software, an emerging trend in online technology, has enabled a new brand of collective, large-scale collaboration—and it may change how businesses keep up with the pace of innovation. By Philip Evans To say that technology has enabled greater communication and collaboration within groups of all types is nothing new. But I have been struck by the level of collaboration now occurring in online environments—the result, in large part, of something called a "wiki." Wiki software, the latest player in the collaborative technology game, harnesses any group's collaborative energy and takes it to the next level. The wiki concept emerged when programmer Ward Cunningham wanted to create the simplest collaboration platform possible: a Web page that nobody would own and that anyone could edit. Among the many wiki-based projects on the Web today, the most prominent may be Wikipedia.org, an online encyclopedia. The Wikipedia has no for- mal oversight and no managing editor. It allows readers to make whatever changes or additions they wish to the document. I've heard some argue that such a process should produce nothing better than graffiti; but somehow it works. The Wikipedia has become one of the Internet's most widely used—and trusted—informational resources. The English language version of the Wikipedia now carries more than 800,000 articles; but versions are published in 205 lan- guages, with a total of 2.6 million articles published worldwide. How could the Wikipedia become an online informational power- house when it has no professional editors and none of the tradition- al "command-and-control" hierarchies that so many businesses emphasize? Simply put, it succeeds because, under the right circum- stances, spontaneous and largely unsupervised collaboration gets the job done, even on a large scale. I find technologically enhanced collaboration so compelling that Bob Wolf, a manager at Boston Consulting Group, and I co- authored an article about it titled "Collaboration Rules" in the July- August 2005 Harvard Bus i ness Review. With global competition driving the speed and importance of innovation, we have found that companies are exploring ways to encourage greater collaboration among employees, suppliers, and customers. Wiki is one mechanism that makes that possible—and it's a tool business students and facul- ty should know how to leverage. 28 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2006