Wiki Corporativa

Introducción a la Wikipedia: Orígenes y definición

Paul Gerbino: "Created by Oregon programmer Ward Cunningham in 1995, wikis have taken off over the last couple of years. Wikis are named after the shuttle buses at Honolulu Airport and means quick. And in many ways wiki are created and edited and re-edited at Internet speeds. The power of a wiki is to extract the collective intelligence of a social network to create documents. These documents can include everything from encyclopedia articles to project development and everything in between".

Una de las más famosas es la Wikipedia, que se describe a sí misma como “free-content encyclopedia, written collaboratively by people from around the world.” El site puede ser editado por cualquiera en Internet así como corregido. Lanzada el 15 de enero de 2001 cuenta con 600.000 artículos en inglés y sobre un millón en múltiples lenguas. El proceso no es estático. "Wikipedia claims daily activity at hundreds of thousands of visitors making tens of thousands of edits and creating thousands of new articles".


Wiki Corporativa
Según lo anterior, se trata de cómo se aplica esto a los negocios. Hay muchos ejemplos hoy en día de compañías que utilizan wikis para tormentas de ideas, "tracking of projects and the creation and editing of corporate documents". Hay un artículo al respecto en Business Week titulado Something Wiki This Way Comes. En él se habla de compañías como Eastman Kodak, Walt Disney y Motorola, que usan tecnologías wiki para intensificar la colaboración. Los beneficios son muchos:

"The benefits of this collaborative approach are many including cutting daily phone calls, e-mails and reducing meeting time. With the Internet 24x7, field offices around the world can contribute to company documents and projects. A wiki promotes consensus across the enterprise where blogs are a place to share opinions. Other benefits include creating a community within the corporation that is not restricted to physical location. It provides a forum for employees to share information as good corporate citizens as well as tapping previously unknown internal resources".

SocialText, "a supplier of blog and wiki technology to the enterprise" tiene algunos casos interesantes en su site. Uno de ellos es Stata Labs en donde fueron capaces de reducir mucho los tiempos de ciclo de producto. "The opportunity to create a shared knowledgebase across a global company helped Stata achieve better communication and support for their employees". Otros ejemplos de este tipo son:

TWiki
JotSpot
Atlassian


En este post se incluyen algunos enlaces interesantes sobre wikis corporativas:

Wiki Providers Eye the Enterprise, eWeek.com, March 21, 2005
Bootstrapping a Corporate Wiki, Lost Boy Blog, February 01, 2005
Year of the enterprise Wiki, InfoWorld, December 30, 2004
Something Wiki This Way Comes, Business Week, June 7, 2004
Wikis in Business, Ross Mayfield SocialText Blog, May 19, 2003
Corporate Collaboration With TWiki, New Architect Magazine, December 2000
Stata Labs: Managing at a Distance, for Less, Company Case Study, SocialText
Wiki while you work, Video, News.Com
Getting 'wiki' with the team, Video, News.Com
Is business waking up to wiki?, Video, News.Com
We are coming to the end of this joint series between ThomasNet Industrial Newsroom and International Association of Online Communicators.




* Blogs ‘n’ Wikis: Business Models or Drinks at a Social Gathering? Part 4 – The Corporate Wiki, por Paul Gerbino, en IAOCBlog, el 30 de junio de 2005