EXPLORING THE VALUE OF ENTERPRISE WIKIS

A Multiple-Case Study

Alexander Stocker

1,2

and Klaus Tochtermann

1,2

Institute for Networked Media, Joanneum Research, Steyrergasse 17, A-8010 Graz, Austria

Know-Center, Inffeldgasse 21a, A-8010 Graz, Austria

Keywords: Knowledge management, Knowledge transfer, Enterprise, Wiki, Value, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0.

Abstract: We present the results of our explorative multiple-case study investigating concept, implementation and

utilization of internal wikis in three Austrian enterprises. We collected all data during structured interviews

with internal knowledge management experts responsible for the wiki implementation and from online

surveys of non-executives employees being users. Our contribution was highly motivated from the

continuing discussion on Corporate Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and unfortunately, the lack of well-

grounded empirical studies by contrast. We feel that challenges and benefits of Web 2.0 technologies and

applications for the enterprise are just starting to be systematically explored.

1 INTRODUCTION

Weblogs, wikis and social media platforms are very

successful on the web. Including Wikipedia,

Facebook, MySpace and many more, they formed

participative environments, allowing everybody to

easily create, share and modify content with very

limited technical expertise. Suchlike Web-2.0-

platforms steadily lowered the barrier to share

knowledge on the web and account for rich sources

for knowledge acquisition.

Motivated from their observations on knowledge

sharing on the web, enterprises slowly begin to

acknowledge the value of Web 2.0 principles and

technologies. The adoption of Web 2.0 was

supposed to lead to manifold business advantages

for various application domains. The ability of Web

2.0 most notably wikis and weblogs, supporting both

corporate knowledge workers and their practices,

had even been awarded with another buzz-word –

Enterprise 2.0 (McAfee, 2006). While weblogs may

serve as a new media for corporate communication

(Kosonen et.al, 2007), wikis illustrate lightweight

web based authoring tools supporting collaborative

content creation in the enterprise.

Cunningham (Cunningham, 2001) defined a wiki

as ‘a freely expandable collection of interlinked web

pages, a hypertext system for storing and modifying

information [and] a database, where each page is

easily edited by any user’. The phenomenal growth

of Wikipedia in users and content inspired many

organisations to experiment with wiki-communities.

Unfortunately, our literature review showed that

very few had been reported about the concrete use of

wikis in the enterprise, yet. The International

Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym) published just one

paper on corporate wikis (Majchrzak et.al, 2006) in

its five years history.

We reviewed the following papers presenting

empirical studies on corporate wikis: Danis and

Singer (Danis and Singer, 2008) conducted a

longitudinal study of a wiki-based application

deployed in a 900 member research organization.

They found out that wiki-articles resulted in a

greater transparency but as a technology the wiki not

always provided fully appropriate affordances.

Hasan and Pfaff (Hasan and Pfaff, 2007)

investigated a single case of wiki-rejection, thereby

discussing challenges and opportunities when

adopting a wiki to manage corporate knowledge.

Management concerns dealt with flattening of

organizational hierarchies and the too innovative

wiki approach towards knowledge acquisition versus

their familiar centralized approach. Social concerns

dealt with openness to vandalism, missing

recognition for authorship and the poor quality

assurance of wiki information. Surveying 168

corporate wiki users from different enterprises,

Majchrzak, Wagner and Yates (Majchrzak et.al,

2006) found out that enterprise wikis enhanced

reputation, made work easier and helped the

organization to improve its processes. Wikis

Stocker A. and Tochtermann K. (2009).

EXPLORING THE VALUE OF ENTERPRISE WIKIS - A Multiple-Case Study.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing, pages 5-12

DOI: 10.5220/0002273200050012

 SciTePress

particularly helped their organizations to improve

workflows, increased collaboration efficiency and

knowledge reuse and identified new business

opportunities. Farell, Kellogg and Thomas (Farell

et.al, 2008) studied the use of wikis within IBM,

requesting all IBM wiki owners to describe their

benefits. They found out that wikis were primarily

used as collaboration spaces for teams but also to

support small ad-hoc groups as well as large

communities and collectives. McAfee (McAfee,

2006) investigated the use of wikis in the investment

bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, furthermore

discussing the ability of wikis (portals) to replace

email (channels) for certain issues, reducing

information overload.

2 RESEARCH DESIGN

2.1 A Multiple-case Study Approach

The corporate adoption of Wikis has rarely been

analyzed in academic literature and benefits from

intraorganizational wikis are just starting to be

explored. We still do not fully understand process,

context and the specific phenomena to be observed

when wikis are used (Danis and Singer, 2008). This

particular circumstance allows multiple-case studies

to be very fruitful (Eisenhardt, 1989), (Miles and

Hubermann, 1984) when aiming at the discovery of

novel constructs to achieve theoretical advances.

Table 1: Key figures of investigated cases.

Alpha Beta Gamma

Industry

Micro-

electronics

Engineering

Services

IT-Services

Number of

employees

2900 250 750

Analyzed

business unit

Support

Department

Whole

Enterprise

Whole

Enterprise

Potential Wiki

users

200 250 750

Estimated

Wiki users

70 180 100

Years

installed

1,5 2 2

Wiki purpose

(Technical)

Support

Technology,

Workflows

Knowledge

Base

Wiki target

group

Support,

R&D

All All

We therefore built upon a multiple-case study of

three Austrian enterprises, adopting wikis to

facilitate intra organizational knowledge transfer.

All three investigated enterprises operated in

different environments, which may affect the

conducted study in various ways. Identifying

common patterns and differences across cases is the

aim of our paper. Table 1 summarizes their main

characteristics of the three case companies – Alpha,

Beta and Gamma which had completed the roll out

of their wiki to at least one and a half years before

the start of our research.

To understand the full context that is how and

why benefits from the implemented wikis had been

gained and which, our paper must provide sufficient

information about the context, i.e. the starting point

for the wiki, its implementation phase and the

perceived value gain.

2.2 Data Collection and Analysis

Our study uses both quantitative and qualitative data

in order to create a valid study following the

requirements of the respective literature (Eisenhardt,

1989) enabling triangulation of evidence. We

diligently applied two data collection techniques:

Conducting structured interviews with internal

wiki experts in the first step, we asked them 40

questions about the degree of organizational

suffering requesting a new solution, their

implementation strategy and

their perceived impact

for individuals and organization, as differentiated in

the (first) Delone and McLean model for

information systems success (Delone and McLean,

2003). The interviews lasted between two and three

hours, each. We documented our qualitative

empirical results in three reports sent to our

interviewees to comment upon and ensure all details

to be interpreted correctly, ensuring construct

validity (Yin, 1984).

Responding to the request from academic

literature on knowledge management (Han and

Vittal, 2006), we also emphasized on knowledge

sharing from a non-executive employee’s

perspective. We therefore surveyed ~150 non-

executive employees being regular knowledge

workers (Drucker, 1959), utilizing wikis in their

daily business in a second step. Our online

questionnaire included 17 questions on reading and

writing behaviour, (knowledge) work practices,

motivation for reading and editing articles, and

perceived benefits and obstacles. In one case of very

low wiki usage, we requested additional information

from non-wiki users. Analysing the quantitative data

collected, we compiled three 20-25 pages reports

aimed to guide executive employees in deriving

better strategies to optimize their wiki utilization.

Summarized, we wanted to find our, how and why

enterprises used a wiki and with what results. We

therefore outlined the following guiding research

questions for our study:

KMIS 2009 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing

• How do enterprises use wikis to support

employees in their daily business?

• Which motivation drives corporate knowledge

workers to utilize wikis?

• What values are generated for individuals and

the organization?

• Which success factors determine effective and

efficient wiki-projects?

Each of these questions was analyzed highlighting

the variety of answers across the cases.

3 MULTIPLE-CASE-STUDY

3.1 Qualitative Results

3.1.1 Case Alpha

We explored the Austrian subsidiary of a large-scale

multinational enterprise, developing highly

innovative technical parts for automotive industry

and industrial electronics. We probed an internal

Wiki-based solution implemented by the local

support department, henceforth called SD. This

solution was aimed to foster knowledge transfer

within SD and beyond on the entire site, employing

about 200 employees mainly occupied with research

and development.

Starting Point. Because of the high degree of

innovation of the conducted research, secrecy was

the utmost principle. Hence researchers operating in

different project teams were separated from each

other by entrance restrictions. SD supported

researchers and developers by providing guidance in

all technical and methodical issues. Each department

member was respectively responsible for a whole

group of researchers. Due to the decentralized

working environments, knowledge transfer within

SD was suboptimal: Internal face-to-face meetings

were limited, yielding to heavy email-traffic and

continuous reinventions of the wheel.

An electronic database was considered to raise

efficiency and effectiveness of SD’s core

responsibilities. The goal was to facilitate

knowledge transfer within SD and to raise the

interconnectedness between department members. A

wiki should help to collect and document support

relevant knowledge and transfer it to all relevant

knowledge seekers.

SD’s manager expected the wiki as the most

suitable platform for knowledge transfer, referring to

wiki-typical simplicity, perceived acceptance as

observed from Wikipedia, special functionality of

wikis, platform independence, and first and foremost

the well-known wiki-principles, allowing every

person to read and quickly edit articles at the same

time. MediaWiki was favoured as Wiki-Software,

because of its high degree of popularity and its proof

of scalability.

Wiki-introduction. The Wiki was introduced top-

down by SD’s manager, who directly reported to the

local site manager who gave the project the

necessary commitment.

Respective MediaWiki-knowledge was available

at the local site and no formal requirement

engineering process was run trough. However first

properties and structures had been eagerly discussed

within internal group meetings, but no strict

definitions arose. The creation of wiki articles was

supposed to happen bottom-up. A strong

involvement of SD in content creation should to lead

to a lively Wiki. To assure immediate adoption,

some relevant content was also migrated from

another repository.

Although the Wiki was based upon the

requirements of SD, all employees at the local site

were able to both read and edit Wiki-pages. Wiki-

users had to be logged in by providing their real

names, anonymous editing was strictly forbidden,

and only administrators were explicitly allowed to

delete Wiki-pages.

A series of actions had been taken to raise both

awareness and acceptance. The wiki was officially

introduced within an SD jour-fixe. Furthermore,

SD’s manager personally introduced the wiki and its

goals and forecasted benefits in all other local

departments. Relevant employees and opinion

leaders were personally invited to actively

participate and stimulate others.

The Wiki allowed access to articles on tool-

specific and methodical support for all in research

and development. With the knowledge provided by

the wiki, researchers and developers were able to

focus their creative potential on the design of

products. Applying wiki-knowledge, they could

learn how to transform a quick idea into a

commercial product.

Wiki-knowledge was organized by tasks and

topics. Categories were used for meta-description

and structuring of articles. However, when

documenting knowledge, employees should avoid

building too hierarchical structures. Such structures

were supposed to increase complexity. An

enterprise-wide roll out of the wiki as a global

support tool was cancelled, fearing the increase of

complexity and information overload.

Results after 1,5 years of Wiki Adoption.

Approximately 500 wiki-articles, periodically

utilized by around 70 local employees, 15 of them

EXPLORING THE VALUE OF ENTERPRISE WIKIS - A Multiple-Case Study

highly involved in editing, had been created in one

and a half years. Based upon a current server-log,

the wiki had been accessed about 130.000 times

since its roll-out and wiki articles had been edited

about 10.000 times. These numbers signalize a very

lively wiki.

The wiki was primarily intended to stimulate and

foster knowledge transfer between SD members, but

it soon became clear that even researchers

themselves could benefit much from action. So far

they were mainly supported via face-to-face

meetings, telephone-calls and emails by SD. As one

SD member had always been personally present

within a group of researchers and developers,

researchers and developers hesitated in active wiki-

participation. From an individual perspective, it

became more effective to directly request guidance

from SD, than to retrieve specific information from

the wiki. While it was well known that researchers

and developers always shared their knowledge on

personal request, they lacked motivation to make

their knowledge explicit in electronic databases.

Researchers even requested SD members to

document ideas on behalf of them, stated doubts

including “usage is very time-consuming”, “the wiki

is too complicated”, “I am too lazy”, “I can directly

ask SD”, or “I lack time”. The degree of raising ones

social or professional reputation by editing wiki-

articles was perceived to be very low.

One important individual value gained from the

wiki was the simple and easy to use full-text search,

allowing quick guidance for emerging problems.

Second, wiki articles incorporated formulations of

both problems and their solutions on a very basic –

easy to understand – level, which was adequate to

the special needs of researchers. Another benefit

dealt with the satisfying level of transparency gained

on support knowledge and respective knowledge

barriers.

As a web-based solution the wiki ensured easy

access without any special authorizations. However,

the most important organizational value from the

wiki was the rise of efficiency and effectiveness in

SD’s core business, providing tool-specific and

methodological support for researchers and

developers.

The following success-factors had been

explicitly named by the interviewees:

• A sufficient number of wiki-articles must exist

right from start for employees to perceive and

accept the wiki as their useful knowledge base.

• The roll-out of the wiki must occur on a broad

user base, requiring a handful convinced users

who stimulate others in personal face-to-face

talks.

• The ‘built-in’ simplicity of wikis rather a

minimum requirement than a success factor.

3.1.2 Case Beta

We explored the Austrian subsidiary of a world-

wide engineering group employing about 250

persons delivering manifold engineering services.

We probed an internal wiki conceptualized and

implemented by a two person core-team responsible

for knowledge management. The new solution was

intended to support most notably technical project

staff in knowledge documentation and learning

within their periodic phases of low workload.

Furthermore it should provide a central base for

knowledge about processes relevant for the

administrative staff.

Starting Point. As the company was lacking an

editorial intranet, documents and templates were

mainly stored in complex hierarchical folders on

file-system level or not accessible at all within a

central database. These aspects limited the ability of

employees to document and share their project-

specific technical knowledge.

In daily business, technical employees

periodically returned to the headquarters from

customer projects, using phases of low workload to

prepare for upcoming projects. Prior to the wiki

implementation, a lot of knowledge flew through the

enterprise and not being absorbed by organizational

or technical knowledge management measures.

Furthermore, the management required a proper

solution for documenting administrative processes

within an electronic database to support the

administrative staff.

A former manager was able to observe a

successful wiki-implementation at a customer’s site,

aiming to document and share technical knowledge

in a simple and effective way in analogy to

Wikipedia. Reflecting on his own enterprise, he

found a suchlike tool very advantageous for project

staff to explicate, codify and share their knowledge.

Such a wiki would enable technical project-staff to

grow a knowledge base for all project relevant

technical knowledge.

Based upon this initial situation, the main goal of

the introduced wiki was to document all technical

knowledge emerging from external projects or

elsewhere perceived to be useful for further projects.

Second, the wiki should be designed to document all

process relevant knowledge to support the

administrative staff, too.

Wiki-introduction. Perspective (www.high-beyond

.com) was chosen as wiki-software: Simple

KMIS 2009 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing

WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you get’) editing

of pages, integrated file-system and document

search, improved support of attachments, and active

directory integration served as the main reasons.

While the implementation of the wiki had

followed a top-down strategy driven by a department

manager, the creation of articles was aimed to result

bottom up. The wiki was divided into two sections:

The first section was dedicated to represent the

knowledge of the technical staff – based on an

enterprise-wide saying that ‘all technical and

organizational knowledge unable to be found via

google in less than two minutes’ should be

documented in the wiki. The second section dealt

with administrative issues and covered all various

forms, templates and process descriptions. All wiki-

users were automatically logged in with their real

names, not allowing any anonymous editing.

The wiki had been implemented without external

help by the two person wiki core-team, consisting of

a technician and a sales representative. First wiki-

structures and properties had been conceptualized in

lively discussions with employees from various

departments. While the core team was manually

editing quite a number of wiki articles for

administrative staff only marginal content was

collected to support technicians.

Results after 2 Years of Wiki Adoption. From the

perspective of our interviewees the wiki served as

the appropriate solution for knowledge transfer,

documentation and sharing, if properly targeted. All

250 employees in the enterprise were able to both

read and edit most of the wiki articles. Though,

some sections, including administrative and project

spaces, had access restrictions.

About 180 employees utilized the knowledge

provided in the technical section, consisting of about

500 wiki-articles incorporating two gigabyte of text

and 20 gigabyte of videos. However, only 15-20

employees coming from projects were able to use

the wiki at the same time, i.e. document and share

technical knowledge within the wiki, as access from

customer sites was not supported. From studying

wiki-log-files the enterprise furthermore learned that

on an average 15 wiki-articles were updated daily.

Overall 20 technicians very intensively created wiki-

articles assuring a lively wiki with up-to-date

knowledge.

The technical section had been strongly co-

developed by the staff: In the beginning, some of

them documented articles on a particular topic or

technology having a private interest. But they soon

realized the potential value of making their private

knowledge professionally useable. Henceforth the

wiki reflected all technical competencies of the

enterprise: Project managers were able to accurately

acquire their project-staff based on an author-content

relationship. It should also be noted that editorial

efforts in the technical section were minimal, only

dealing with the reassignment of articles to certain

wiki-categories.

Unfortunately, the administrative section was the

problem child. Although intensive internal

marketing activities had been conducted, the

administrative staff hesitated to use the wiki and

refused to update wiki articles. Most of the non-

technical articles had been created by a former wiki

core-team member, who left the enterprise. After his

exit the up-to-datedness of wiki articles continuously

declined, now rendering most of them useless.

Observing obstacles and barriers for wiki

utilization, the core-team found out that technical

staff was much more willing to ‘suffer’ from the

additional work load triggered by the wiki. Non

technical staff always complained about its lower

comfort compared to their well-known office tools.

Technical staff perceived a higher value gain, most

notably because of the faster and more structured

access to project relevant technical knowledge.

Articles within the technical section allowed not

only access to textual content but also to (software)

tools located on file-system level. On an

organizational level, the wiki simplified

collaboration amongst (technical) employees.

Technical staff also managed to use their idle

capacities to transfer knowledge.

A huge obstacle accompanying wiki adoption

was the fact that employees only recognized its

value after having intensively used it. Unfortunately,

communicating this special aspect of social software

to employees is extremely challenging. A successful

adoption of portals, like a wiki, must always be

accompanied by a change in employee behaviour.

To achieve this, much management attention is

required: Putting a ‘gentle pressure’ on employees

will facilitate the emergence of effective wiki

practices.

The following success-factors had been

explicitly named by the interviewees:

• Wikis require a dedicated and very optimistic

core team in charge of all activities having

reasonable time.

• Wikis require a corporate culture privileging

open communication

• Management commitment and management

attention are a must have, a company wide wiki

may not be the initiative of a single person or

department.

• Future wiki-users have to be integrated into

conception and implementation from the start.

EXPLORING THE VALUE OF ENTERPRISE WIKIS - A Multiple-Case Study

3.1.3 Case Gamma

We explored a major Austrian IT service provider

employing more than 750 people. We probed an

internal wiki intended to serve as an electronic

knowledge base in analogy to Wikipedia. The new

solution was aimed to support everybody by

providing stable, long-term knowledge, periodically

required by employees.

Starting Point. Since the foundation of the

company a plethora of internal databases partly

containing redundant knowledge had emerged.

Hence opinions were voiced demanding a more

centralized environment. A 10 persons group

responsible for knowledge management bear the

idea to deploy a knowledge management tool based

on user generated content. The group was very much

attracted by the wiki-principles, which allowed

everybody to contribute to a central platform in a

self organized way. They perceived Wikipedia as the

archetype of a corporate wiki.

The aim of the introduced wiki was to develop a

centralized electronic knowledge base involving all

employees in content creation. This to develop

company-wide encyclopaedia was designed to

contain a precisely defined set on topics and articles

as well as most prevalent abbreviations and short

terms for products and services used in daily

business. Such knowledge was not available in a

centralized platform yet. Besides, the wiki should

only contain long-term knowledge. Such wiki-

knowledge was intended to be accessed without any

restricitions.

Wiki-introduction. The wiki had been introduced

two years ago without external consultancy.

However, some implementation support was

provided by an affiliate company. JSP-wiki

(www.jspwiki.org) was chosen as wiki-software, as

expert knowledge was available. The wiki project

team consisted of four selected members of the

group responsible for knowledge management. The

project team designed first wiki-structures and

edited some content. Intranet articles, flyers and

news tickers were disseminated to facilitate the

acceptance of the wiki. The wiki project was also

formally approved by the company management.

The wiki-group very strictly defined, which

knowledge was allowed to flow into the wiki: basic

information on customers, projects, technology,

expertise as well as information about the enterprise

and the knowledge management group. The wiki

contained glossaries, frequently used terms, project-

names and explanations, descriptions of the

departments, customer names and abbreviations.

Meeting minutes, project relevant knowledge,

knowledge related to interpersonal communication,

news and specific reports were not intended to be

part of the wiki as parallelisms of the wiki to the

existing editorial intranet had to be avoided.

Results after Two Years of Wiki Adoption. The

majority of the targeted employees still hesitate to

use the wiki: 10 employees most notably managers

as well as members of the knowledge management

group take frequently use of it. A second group,

larger in number, still perceived the wiki as a

valuable tool but reflected that adopting such a tool

affords a lot of voluntariness being the obstacle for a

broader wiki-adoption. Therefore, they rarely edited

and only sporadically read wiki-articles. The largest

group of employees did not use the wiki at all.

The project-staff responsible for the wiki

introduction conceptualized the wiki as a fast-

selling- item. But after two years of wiki adoption

they learned that the majority of employees lacked

confidence in operating such a tool. However,

surveying non-wiki users, we found that there are far

more aspects slowing down the wiki success: Most

of the wiki articles are merely relevant for the daily

work assignments. Answering employees did not

perceive an added value from the wiki. Furthermore,

the aim of the wiki was perceived to be too broad

and should be narrowed down.

Though wiki-users perceived wiki articles as

being helpful in their daily business, many of them

hardly used the wiki. They stumbled upon its very

challenging handling, most notably the

uncomfortable editor and the complicated wiki-

syntax. On an organizational level, the wiki

increased the transparency on knowledge. Collecting

and documenting information seemed to work fine

from the perspective of the wiki group. However,

only few articles had been collaboratively edited,

numerous wiki-revisions were only to be found on

the main pages.

Though the corporate culture was perceived to

be very participative, employees sensed many

obstacles to edit wiki content, most notably because

of their lacking anonymity. Some employees had

problems to understand the wiki-structure when

trying to publish articles.

The following success-factors had been explicitly

named by the interviewees:

• It is crucial for wiki-success to acquire first-

movers motivating others to participate.

• Wikis have to be rolled out with articles to

motivate employees to participate.

• Though being social software, wikis require

very intensive internal marketing activities.

KMIS 2009 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing

Table 2: Overview of cases studies.

Case Alpha Case Beta Case Gamma

Status quo

Lacking knowledge transfer

in R&D support department

Lacking knowledge documentation

and learning

Certain knowledge was not available

in centralized base

Wiki goal

Centralized and lively knowledge base

support

Document and share technical and

administrative knowledge

Develop a centralized electronic

knowledge base

Introduction Support Wiki (MediaWiki)

Wiki for technical and administrative

staff (Perspective)

Wiki for all employees (JSP-Wiki)

Results

Raised efficiency and effectiveness

of support

Simpler search and retrieval

of problem descriptions

Facilitated technical knowledge sharing

Better exploitation of phases

of low workload

Improved collection and

documentation of information

Named

Success

Factors

Provide sufficient wiki-articles right

from start

Roll-out wikis on broad employee basis

Acquire convinced users who motivate

others

Dedicated and optimistic wiki-team

having reasonable time

Corporate culture privileging open

communication

Management commitment and attention

Acquire first-movers motivating others

to participate

Roll-out with sufficient wiki-articles

Perform intensive internal marketing

activities

• Wiki users have to perceive the value of a wiki

right on from the start.

3.2 Quantitative Results

Surveying altogether 150 non-executive employees

from our three cases, we were able to validate results

from the conducted expert-interviews. In this

section, we present selected results on reading and

writing behaviour, type and frequency of wiki-

contribution, business-relevant information sources,

rationale to read and edit articles, individual and

collective impact, and perceived obstacles of wiki

adoption.

Knowledge about reading and writing

behaviour allows measuring the success of wiki

implementations. Although the knowledge sharing

dilemma (Cabrera and Cabrera, 2002) could be

overcome on the web, mainly due to the manifold

number of potential knowledge sharers, our study

revealed that situation in companies is still different:

Reading behaviour clearly differs across cases, but

the relationship between reading and editing wiki-

articles is quite similar: Only a very small fraction of

employees counted for regular edits. We interpret

observed differences in wiki usage by referring on

the different nature of our three cases. While Alpha

and Beta demonstrated more precisely defined

business-cases, clearly stating goal, context, target

groups and expected impact for users and collective,

Gamma remains much more ambiguous as

especially our survey of wiki deniers revealed.

The lower editing behaviour in Alpha as

compared to Beta can be explained by the precisely

defined, but lower in size, target group responsible

for wiki articles in Alpha. The strength of Beta was

the successful development of a lively enterprise

wide wiki: The high affinity of wiki users, most

notably technicians, seemed to stimulate regular

reading and editing practices.

Surveying on type and frequency of wiki-

contributions, we found out that minor edits of

existing articles and creation of new articles prevail.

Correcting grammar and spelling, reverting articles

using the revision history, restructuring articles and

commenting articles were clearly outnumbered.

Surveying on enterprise-wide sources of

information relevant to daily business, non-

executive employees of Alpha and Beta clearer

perceived the wiki counting to them. In Gamma,

wiki-information seemed to bypass the demands of

information seekers. Interestingly, employees of

Beta seemed to prefer archives and portals including

web, document-management and file-server towards

channels, including telephone, email and face-to-

face conversations. In Alpha and Gamma traditional

media prevailed as sources for business-relevant

information.

Finding relevant information, facilitating one’s

individual work and observing what is happening

within the enterprise accounted for the main reasons

to use the wiki. To actively counteract email- and

face-to-face-meeting overloads hardly stimulated

wiki usage. However, such aspects were considered

to come along with enterprise wikis in the literature

(McAfee, 2006). Furthermore and contrary to the

literature (McAfee, 2006) private issues seemed to

play a minor role in all three cases.

The main motives for non-executive employees

to actively participate in article creation were a

perceived value of their own wiki-contributions, the

expectation of individual benefits from the wiki and

the stimulation of colleagues to actively participate

in content creation. As already known from the

classical knowledge management literature

(Davenport and Prusack, 1998), reciprocity seemed

to play a very crucial role along with wiki

knowledge sharing.

EXPLORING THE VALUE OF ENTERPRISE WIKIS - A Multiple-Case Study

Surveyed on the individual value gained from wiki

usage, non-executive employees in Alpha and Beta

perceived the wiki had in some extent helped them

to perform business tasks quicker, finally facilitating

their knowledge work. However, to a much lesser

extent, they were able to raise their social and

professional states. Gamma’s Non-executive emplo-

yees seemed to be quite less supported by the wiki.

Surveyed on the collective value for team and/or

organization gained from the wiki, employees

noticed an improvement of knowledge transfer and a

boost in work performance in Alpha and Beta. In

Beta the wiki also led to improved collaboration.

The Wiki in Gamma seemed to generate only

marginal advantages for the organization.

Surveyed on perceived obstacles of successful

wiki adoptions employees identified few employees

creating articles, few created articles, unequal write

access, and time consuming editing and retrieval of

knowledge to belong to those. Interestingly,

conflicts between wiki editors regarding the content

of an article, and the transparency wikis entailed,

were not considered to be major obstacles.

4 CONCLUSIONS

Investigating three different cases of enterprise wikis

enabled us to gain many findings. Taking a closer

look at the business perspective, our studies revealed

that enterprises have difficulties to map their

business goals towards the goals of their wikis.

Though enterprises may easily understand manifold

original benefits coming along with wikis as new

knowledge transfer tools, they often fail to generate

a concrete value. There is still a large gap between

the knowledge management/transfer view and the

business view, which has to be overcome in order to

fully exploit the potential wikis bear.

We hold that corporate wikis have to solve a

clearly specified problem situation which is crucial

to the core business and relevant for the work

practices of employees. Without taking a clear

business perspective, enterprises are limited to

reason on a knowledge management level, especially

when surveyed on goals and benefits. Therefore they

will highlight soft benefits including generation of

transparency on knowledge or the deployment of a

central and easily accessible knowledge base.

However, it must be the utmost principle to precisely

understand that there is a business problem, which

has to be tackled before implementing a wiki. Our

future work will aim to concretise differences

between the business view and the knowledge view

and suggest measures to overcome this gap.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Know-Center is funded within the Austrian

COMET Program - Competence Centers for

Excellent Technologies - under the auspices of the

Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation

and Technology, the Austrian Federal Ministry of

Economy, Family and Youth and by the State of

Styria. COMET is managed by the Austrian

Research Promotion Agency FFG.

REFERENCES

Cabrera, A.; Cabrera E.: Knowledge Sharing Dilemmas. In:

Organization Studies, Vol.23, No.5, pp.687-710, 2002.

Leuf, B.; Cunningham, W.: The Wiki Way – Quick Colla-

boration on the Web, Addison-Wesley, New York, 2001.

Danis, C.; Singer, D.: A Wiki Instance in the Enterprise:

Opportunities, Concerns and Reality. In Proceedings

of the ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported

Cooperative Work, San Diego, USA, 2008.

DeLone, W.; E. McLean, E: Information Systems Success:

The Quest for the Dependent Variable. Information

Systems Research, 3(1), 1992, pp. 60–95, 1992.

Davenport, T.; Prusak, L.: Working Knowledge: How

Organizations Manage What They Know, Cambridge,

MA, Harvard Business School Press, 1998.

Drucker, P.: Landmarks of Tomorrow: A report on the

new 'post-modern' world, New York, Harper and Row,

1959.

Eisenhardt, K.: Building Theories from Case Study

Research. In: Acedemy of Management Review, Vol.

14, No., 4, 532-550, 1989.

Farrell, R.; Kellogg, W. Thoma, J.: The Participatory Web

and the Socially Resilient Enterprise, IBM T.J.

Watson Research Center, Proceedings of CSCW, 2008.

Brent, H.; Anantatmula, V.: Knowledge Management in

IT Organizations From Employee’s Perspective. In:

Proceedings of the 39

International Conference on

System Sciences, Hawaii, 2006.

Kosonen, M.; Henttonen, K.; Ellonen, H.-K.: Weblogs and

internal communication in a corporate environment: a

case from the ICT industry, in: International Journal

of Knowledge and Learning, Volume 3, Number 4-5 /

2007, 437 – 449.

Majchrzak, A.; Wagner, C.; Yates, D.: Corporate Wiki

Users: Results of a Survey, in: Proceedings of the

2006 International Symposium on Wikis, 2006.

McAfee, A.: Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Colla-

boration. In: MITSloan Management Review, 2006.

Miles, M. B.; Hubermanm A.M.: Qualitative data analysis:

A sourcebook of new methods, California, Sage

Publications, 1984.

Yin, Robert: Case study research: design and methods,

Sage Publications, 2003.

KMIS 2009 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing