StartupSpot

Crossing the Chasm with Enterprise Wikis

2007 was a good year for CustomerVision. We added a lot of new customers to our growing list of BizWiki users and we continued to lead the way with innovative features designed to encourage wiki adoption by mainstream business users.

But the thing I’m most proud about CustomerVision is that we’ve managed to translate the innovations found in technologies such as wikis and social networking into a product that’s adopted by mainstream users and that produces vital customer results for customers who would otherwise have not been able to tap these technologies.

As a small company we were excited to be included this year in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Collaboration but disappointed that we did not score higher on the Visionary curve. The companies that tended to score well were west coast companies that are located in the heart of the Silicon Valley echo chamber and who are quick to integrate a variety of the cutting edge concepts percolating around them from the world of “Web 2.0”.

I think this perception that it’s visionary to lead the charge in integrating the latest and greatest “web 2.0” concepts is created by a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s required to be visionary in this space.

There’s no doubt that our west coast competitors are full of smart people and are close to major sources of innovation but these concepts are not gaining near as much interest among the majority of mainstream adopters as the technology merits.

Following the model (outlined in Geoffrey Moore’s famous book, Crossing the Chasm) the market is made up of innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. There are some great options in the world of enterprise wikis for the innovators and potentially the early adopters but CustomerVision is unique in creating a product for the early majority and late majority or what most people would consider “mainstream” adopters.

If you look around for case studies documenting real world wiki success stories you’ll find lots of examples of software development teams, documentation groups or technology companies that are getting powerful benefits from the use of wiki technology. But where the industry really needs innovation and vision is in communicating and demonstrating that this technology can solve critical problems for mainstream business users in marketing, sales and support roles.

SaaS Behind the Firewall

From the beginning CustomerVision was designed as a hosted application. We saw many benefits to this approach including:

1. The SaaS (Software as a Service) model reduces customer expenses on hardware, services and IT staff since we provide this for all our customers.
2. Under the SaaS model we support and manage only a single version of the software. This means significantly lower support costs get passed on because we don't have to support multiple versions or releases.
3. With all of our customers using the latest version of the software we can introduce new features and enhancements to our entire installed base at the same time.

Many of our customers, including major Fortune 500 companies have embraced the SaaS based approach but for various reasons SaaS is still not a fit for everyone. In those cases we've found that our customers still benefit from the SaaS based design of our software. We have many customers who want the software to be hosted in their data center but who allow us to administer the application so, even though it lives behind their firewall, they still always have the latest version and we are always in a position to immediately address any support issues.

CustomerVision BizWiki screencast

I've been working on a screencast that provides an overview of CustomerVision as a company and an introduction to the BizWiki software.

I've included a YouTube widget to view the product as well as a link to a higher resolution version. YouTube is a convenient way to share video but its still pretty low resolution for viewing a demo.

Click Here to go to the high resolution version

Using a Wiki to Power a Website

One of the ways our customers use CustomerVision BizWiki is as a way to power a company website.

The great thing about a wiki based website is that it provides a company with full control over the site without the need for any technical expertise and it enables a collaborative, dynamic way to create and update content. For the site owner, having an edit button on each page and the other wiki features such as Recent Changes, Page History and Discussion makes a wiki a very powerful and efficient content management system.

In this type of implementation the wiki is not configured to be an open, “Wikipedia style” wiki. CustomerVision BizWiki allows a company to control exactly who sees the wiki tools and who doesn’t, so site administrators will see the wiki tools and visitors won’t. So, even when wiki tools are only available to the core team, it still provides them with all the advantages of the wiki approach.

In addition to powering our own site, CustomerVision BizWiki powers a number of company websites such as:

• https://www.mwabank.com/
• http://www.colemanmoorecompany.com/
• http://www.edmchamber.org/
• http://www.egrowthgroup.com/
• http://www.greatercarlislefoundation.org/
• http://www.scourstop.com/
• http://www.iowaculturalcoalition.org/
• http://www.ceoiowa.com/
• http://www.livingwebconsulting.com/
• http://www.mortgagesuccesslibrary.com/

Wikis for Workplace Communities

CustomerVision's growth has been accelerating this year and one of the areas of growth has been what I’m calling Workplace Communities.

CustomerVision makes it easy for a team to publish news, reference materials and discussions. Sometimes these communities are all within one workplace but a more common scenario is supporting communities that include customers, partners and members of an industry group.

These companies are choosing CustomerVision because we give them a ton of functionality all in one easy package. With our On Demand model with no hardware or setup a company can quickly provide a resource that includes site creation, easy content sharing, rich discussion functionality, the ability to segment the site for partners, document sharing and everything they need to build a next generation community site.

Wikis that are designed for business use have a lot of advantages over previous generation technologies. With a wiki it’s easy to quickly put up thousands of pages of content to support a business objective and then the discussion can support and enhance that content rather than the old way of treating those separately. This reflects how businesses really work and helps direct the interactions in a way that supports the business.

Enterprise 2.0 Strict vs. Enterprise 2.0 Transitional

Andrew McAfee makes another great contribution to the discussion on the Enterprise 2.0 concept through his post titled Enterprise 2.0 Inclusionists and Deletionists. He makes a good argument for his original fairly strict and simple definition of Enterprise 2.0 software.

The following is his definition:

"Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia's definition).

Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.

Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time.

Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional
• Free of up-front workflow
• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
• Accepting of many types of data"

To me the most interesting parts of his definition are the elements under his Freeform attribute because, as he made clear, those are the elements that make the software emergent.

Even though I find his definition compelling I might use it a bit differently.

I believe that software that matches his definition will become popular in the enterprise but as with any new technology there will be a transitional period and many applications will be transitional applications.

In much the same way the web standards have evolved from the crude HTML hacks of the 90’s on its way to web standards and the semantic web, we are in for a long period of coexistence with traditional enterprise applications, transitional applications and pure Enterprise 2.0 applications.

I find Andrews’s definition to be effective even though I don’t believe it will be possible to say that an application inherently meets that definition out of the box. There will certainly be applications that can be deployed in either an Enterprise 2.0 mode or a traditional mode or a transitional mode and enterprises will find a way to deploy even the purist Enterprise 2.0 web software in a way that’s not optional or egalitarian. So if you wanted to “certify” an application as Enterprise 2.0 you’d have to look at the implementation to decide whether it was Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 Transitional or not Enterprise 2.0 at all.

And I have to comment on a statement he makes at the end of his article:

And one piece of free advice: Don't use '2.0' as part of any new term; people seem to be getting tired of it very quickly.

I know were he’s coming from on this and I’ve thought the same thing a couple of times but to be honest I’m getting tired of people talking about how they're tired of everything 2.0. Give me a break. The vast majority of people in the world have never heard the term in any context so it seems a bit ahead of the curve to get tired of something no one to speak of has even heard of.

Obviously technology and our perception of how to use it is changing all the time and the label 2.0 is just a term that some people interested in these topics find useful in discussing the next cycle of innovation. If you don’t like it or don’t find it useful it actually seems like it must be pretty easy to ignore since more than 99.99 percent of the people in the world are ignoring it right now.

What does Bill Gates think about Wikis?

Ok. I want you to read the following quote and guess who made this remark:

You know, as I mentioned, the consumer Web is moving at a very rapid pace, and so wikis, the idea that in some cases you want everybody to be able to contribute and come in, offer up their ideas, if you can just get the basic site organization right, the kind of creativity and participation from an organization that you can see can be very, very strong and really encouraging people, not a formal process, the wiki lets that happen.

Was it maybe Ross Mayfield or Cindy Rockwell or Mike Cannon-Brookes?

Good guesses but no.

It was Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation at the SharePoint Conference in May of 2006

Ok, let’s try another quote:

What we need is the ability for an individual, very easily without contacting the IT department, to essentially create a Web site, and as they do that to decide, based on a set of templates, exactly what type of Web site it would be. You may have heard people talk about blogs and wikis as things that are flourishing on the Internet; those are ways that lots of people can contribute and comment on things, you can edit different things, see who is agreeing or disagreeing, and they're wonderful bottom's up tools.

Was it Ward Cunningham or Jimmy Wales? Nope.

It was Bill Gates at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum Europe in February of 2006.

Top 10 Applications for an Enterprise Wiki

Below is my list of the Top 10 Applications for an Enterprise Wiki.

1. Sales Support - Sales has a huge need for information and a lot of time constraints. An Enterprise Wiki is a great way for an organization to support sales and for sales to share information.
2. Project Communication - An Enterprise Wiki isn't going to provide you with Gantt charts but it's a very effective way to manage the communication that's vital to project success.
3. Informal Learning - Wikis help people search for and share knowledge that enhances organizational performance.
4. Application Support - Wikis are an ideal way to bring people up to speed quickly and keep them informed about complex applications.
5. Channel Communications - Good communication is essential to channel effectiveness. Wikis make it easy to create dynamic, two way communications between an organization and its network.
6. Non-Profits - Because non-profits often have diverse stakeholders, wikis are an ideal way to foster communications and feedback.
7. Intranets - In many cases Enterprise Wikis are taking over as the primary means of internal communications and knowledge sharing.
8. Market Research - Enterprise Wikis, especially those that incorporate extensive blog capabilities are a powerful platform for capturing and sharing relevant information about prospects, markets, competitors and industry trends.
9. Product Planning - An Enterprise Wiki is an excellent way to share ideas and collaborate in the product planning process as well as providing a powerful platform for communication as the product concept is implemented.
10. Customer Service - Many large organizations start out using a wiki as a great way for customer service and support to find and share information. Then over time they increasingly get customers involved in the collaboration and knowledge sharing process.

Great Enterprise 2.0 Blogs

CustomerVision CEO Cindy Rockwell and I both write wiki related blogs but I thought I would list some of my other favorite wiki and Enterprise 2.0 blogs.

The blogs on my list cover wikis and social computing in the enterprise. There are a number of good blogs that cover general wiki and social computing issues but there are a surprisingly small number of them that speak in depth about social computing within the enterprise.

The list includes:

• WikiThat! written by Kris Olsen
• Ross Mayfield's Weblog obviously written by Ross Mayfield
• Venture Chronicles written by Jeff Nolan
• Andrew McAfee - associate professor in the technology and operations management unit at Harvard Business School
• All Kind Food written by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D
• Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog written by Dion Hinchcliffe
• Headshift Weblog
• Innovation Creators by  Rod Boothby

Enterprise 2.0 and the Debate about Technology and Control

Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, makes a number of excellent points in his article Enterprise 2.0, SoA and the Freeform Advantage. His article explores the potential debate about the issues of technology and control:

If there is debate, it will be on two fronts: the role of organizational identities (Egalitarian) or an emphasis on technology over social dynamics.

He quotes Andrew McAfee on the second point:

Programmers could build fully-functional wikis, blogs, tagging systems, and prediction markets by carving them out of solid COBOL and serving them through the first Netscape browser. They'd be clunky, but they'd work. And I bet they'd draw users, too, because they'd tap into our desire to use technology to interact with each other, and also tap into the good stuff that emerges when we do so.

I agree completely with this point. I think Web 2.0 has a lot more to do with concepts like emergence and self-organization than it does with a snapshot of the current technology in vogue.

And he makes a strong statement of his own on the first point, which I endorse:

Every sacrifice made for sake of control reduces network effects, assumes a static environment you can design against and is designed by supposed experts outside the context of use. Contrary to the most disruptive pattern of social software -- sharing control creates value.

While I agree with his primary points I would argue with certain aspects of his examples.

I don’t think the mere existence of granular access control is the cause of the problem. I think the real problem, as he pointed out is the model where a supposed expert exerts control outside the context of use. But for example, I think freely mixing single author and multi-author wiki pages increases the opportunity to leverage the advantages of a wiki without causing the problem of inappropriate control. Allowing authors to create a “single author” page that’s not open for edits is not the same thing as exerting control outside the context of use.

Examples of single author content that’s often shared in a wiki include:

• A press release
• A letter from the CEO
• Pricing information
• Explicit operational instructions from a customer or partner

I would also make the same point about simple workflow and templates. Workflow and templates can be used for control and they will have the negative impacts he suggests but they can also be used to simplify user contribution. For example, it’s extremely common for a new wiki user to copy an existing article and then edit it as a way to get started. Giving that user both the option of a blank page and a choice of templates to start from increases their freedom and ability to contribute. A good example of positive structure is wikiHow and we’ll certainly see more such prominent examples in the future.

Below are some examples of how I think workflow and templates can increase user contribution and emergent behavior

• Question and answer workflow as the basis for a new wiki page
• Simple workflow such as the “draft mode” concept which can encourage people to contribute partial ideas that they explicitly want help with
• Providing optional templates and forms to help people with new articles

To me the core wiki principles that Ward Cunningham outlined such as Open, Incremental, Organic, Observable, etc. are still prescient and provide valuable guidelines as wikis gain prominence within the Enterprise. Those original principles provide some very specific guidelines but they don’t prescribe the features or technologies that are appropriate to support those principles.