Management of Wikis in Business by Penny Edwards

Tags: Penny Edwards, Wikis, Corporate Adoption, Enterprise Adoption, Business, Feedback Poll, Business Value, Dennis McDonald, Survey, Social Computing Adoption, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Collaboration, Communities, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Remote Collaboration

A few days ago, while I was trying to settle back in from my trip to Paris and also right before I had my computer issues knocking me down for a couple of days, I received an e-mail from Penny Edwards asking me if I would be kind enough to contribute into a feedback poll she has been working on, trying to evaluate the management of wikis in different businesses. Now, most people who know me would probably let you know how I am not so keen on filling surveys all over the place, but in this particular case from Penny I am actually making an exception, because I strongly believe it is worth while the time spent on it. And here is why.

Penny is trying to evaluate the kind of impact that wikis are having within the corporate world and, for that matter as well, with smaller businesses, too. She realises how new technologies that have been available out there for a few years now are emerging more and more within the corporate firewall to help knowledge workers share their knowledge and collaborate with one another perhaps much more effectively than ever before and they are starting to show some promise.

So with that goal set up ahead she has put together a Management of Wikis in Business feedback poll, where she is actually asking us 30 different multiple choice questions where we can certainly share our thoughts about how our own businesses are starting to make extensive use of wikis behind the firewall. My good friend Dennis McDonald has already weblogged about it as well and has shared a short paragraph that Penny put together ass well that gives people a good idea of what the purpose of the poll is and it shows already some of the goals behind it:

"Penny Edwards is working on a study regarding managing wikis in business as part of her MBA Technology Management research with the Open University, UK. She has published a survey about wiki management on her wiki, focusing on people who use or manage wikis in the business environment. The survey takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. If you would like to help out, follow the link (http://pennyedwards.net/tiki-list_surveys.php) and fill in the survey. Your participation would be much appreciated."

As the above mentioned paragraph states, the poll takes you about 10 minutes. Actually it is a bit shorter than that, a bit over seven minutes and while going through the questions you can see how Penny has put together lots of thought to a good set of questions and through them you would be able to see how she nails it down as far as how most businesses are already making use of wikis. Pretty interesting stuff, because she is offering some really good tips on how to make the best out of the wiki, how you can build up a business case for it, and how you can get things going if you would want to get one started yourself, along with giving you a good idea of how much your business has been involved with wikis thus far.

Very very helpful, indeed, and worth while seven minutes of your time, don’t you think? I do hope you folks out there get a chance to spend a few minutes filling it in as well, so that, when she is ready to share the results with us, we would all have a much better understanding of how wikis are bringing together really good opportunities for boosting knowledge sharing and collaboration. That way, we can convince the powers that be that we need tools such as wikis in order to help bring knowledge sharing into the next level of interactions through the adoption of social computing for day to day business, which I guess is the main goal for most of us.

That is the main reason why I have agreed with her to fill in the poll first and then help get the word out there so that we can have enough meaningful data to build up better informed opinions as the kind of impact of these technologies within the business world. So whenever you get a chance go and fill in the feedback poll and let’s all wait in anticipation for the results because I bet they would be rather enlightening with very interesting and revealing data on how we can improve the overall experience of adopting social computing, and wikis in particular, within the enterprise.

Good luck, Penny, and look forward to seeing the results from the feedback poll! Good work!