Wikis, blogs and other community tools in the enterprise

Solve enterprise application problems with social collaboration technology

Joel A. Farrell (joelf@us.ibm.com), Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM, Software Group

Joel joined IBM in 1981 and has worked on advanced software projects throughout his career. He is currently part of the Emerging Internet Technologies organization, exploring such technology areas as Services Oriented Architecture, medical informatics, online communities, and social networking software. Joel has also been involved in the development of software architecture patterns and other efforts to simplify the creation of software solutions. He currently serves as the Chair of the Technical Steering Committee of the MedBiquitous Consortium, a health care standards body. Recently, he has been focusing on how wikis can help facilitate teams and online communities and how the wiki concept itself can be extended to support more kinds of content-centric collaboration.

Summary: Wikis and Web logs (blogs) make a big impact on the Web, but they can also be useful in an enterprise. A community is a group of people with common interests, goals, or responsibilities, such as a project team or an interest group. Combine wikis and blogs with existing collaborative tools to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of enterprise teams.

Date: 23 Mar 2006
Level: Introductory
Activity: 627 views
Comments:

The phenomenon of online communities has developed in stride with the Web itself. The practice of people collaborating on ideas and information online towards a common goal, is seen in various forms including e-mail, mailing lists, online forums, Web-based application development tools, instant messaging, and Web portals. Recently, two community tools have gained considerable attention: wikis and blogs (Web logs).

Wikis were invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham to support the Portland Patterns Repository familiar to many software engineers. A wiki is a readable and writeable Web site in which potentially all the visitors to the site can create new pages or modify existing ones, with optional access control to set limits on authorship. Typically, users create content using simple markup to very quickly make their contributions. On the Internet, projects using wikis have made some remarkable accomplishments. Perhaps the most impressive is Wikipedia (see Resources), a highly regarded, wiki-based encyclopedia created by thousands of contributors from around the world.

A blog is a Web site easily updated by a person who posts information for others to read. The readers can post comments on the entries made by the owner of the blog, but cannot post top-level content.

This article concentrates on how wikis and blogs, in conjunction with other community tools, are used in the enterprise and what potential new uses are emerging. I will also focus on how these new community tools relate to the groupware and team collaboration software now in use by many organizations and how to go about selecting the right tool for the right job.

Communities on the Web

Several types of communities on the Web make use of various types of community tools. A first class example is the Wikipedia-type community that comes together to create a work product on the Web. The Portland Patterns Repository is an early example of a group coming together to create a shared resource on the Web. The world of open standards generates other communities in this class. One new use of wikis is to collaboratively write a specification document for a open standards organization. A prime example is the Atom protocol specification for content syndication, widely used by blog sites. The Atom team built their initial specification collaboratively on their wiki (see Resources). They also managed their project management issues and maintained related documentation, all on the same wiki. Now that Atom is handled by a working group at the IETF, the wiki is still used to track issues and provide a unified information collection point for the Atom community.

A second class is involved with the open source software phenomenon. Open source software projects use Wikis, blogs, discussion forums, and other tools to manage their projects, develop documentation, make decisions and publicize their deliverables. The Apache Foundation uses a wiki for each of its open source projects and points to them all from an organization-wide wiki site (see Resources). The individual projects use their wikis to create project documentation, track and manage the project, and provide information to developers in the community. A wiki fits very well into an open source community since it embodies the same open, group contribution model upon which the open source movement itself is based. It also complements the other community tools that these groups have used for a number of years.

Community tools are also closely associated with the growing phenomena of social networking sites on the Web. Social networking software uses the connections between people to create, manage and build value on common interests, working relationships, and common requirements. Social networking tools such as shared bookmark services and relationship network analysis help form communities and keep them vibrant. Wikis, blogs, and discussion groups are sometimes combined with social networking tools in a community site to facilitate information sharing.

Community tools are beginning to make real the concept of the Read/Write Web. In this vision, a user of the Web does not just browse for information or submit form data as pat of e-commerce transactions, but contributes content to sites as a fundamental part of the Web experience. Wikis and blogs are leading tools in this transformation, with blogs especially providing a very easy way for Web users to publish information of all kinds.

The roles of community tools

An effective online community uses a set of community tools, each in the roll it is best fitted to serve. Not all communities need the same types of support. Community tools break into five groups:

Wiki
Wikis support shared content creation in an open, community-directed way.
Blog or Web Log
A blog promotes the simple publication of information from a single source, usually an individual, and facilitates the registering of comments by members of the community. It is sometimes used to make announcements, communicate news, or just present an opinion.
e-mail lists and discussion forums
These mechanisms support threaded discussions and are often used to facilitate issue resolution and voting.
Web Sites and Web Portals
Communities often have traditional Web sites and Web portals to deliver more static or controlled information. A Web site can be the face of the community to non-members, and can provide Web applications to the community members.
Groupware
Groupware includes group collaboration and document-centric systems like Lotus® Domino®, Lotus Domino Document Manager, and Lotus QuickPlace®. These tools usually support more critical business processes, where strict document control and enforceable business policies are needed.

Some have tried to use a wiki to support the role of a discussion forum, but the inherent freedom of the wiki worked against the need to keep chronological order, separate threads, and make it easy for someone to follow the progress of a discussion. Also, blogs do not fill this role since the discussion is controlled by the blog owner. A commenter cannot start a new thread. Equally, Web sites and groupware with their content management approaches cannot usually fit the roll played by a wiki. Unlike content management-oriented approaches, a wiki supports an organic evolution of the structure and content of the site based on the dynamics of the individuals in the community. It allows collaborators to collectively change the content very quickly, with no process or workflow overhead. While this characteristic forces the community to police the wiki to eliminate incorrect or inappropriate content, it is also a primary reason for wiki success. I will discuss the freedom versus control issue in a later section.

How wiki communities work

Communities that collaborate through wikis share much in common with open source software development projects. Many open source projects use wikis as a project management and documentation tool. However, the similarities are more fundamental than that. Wiki collaboration and open source development are based on a core set of principles. Principles for wikis can be summarized as:

Egalitarian. Any participant can submit new content. For some wikis, submitting content is all it takes to become a participant. Any participant can change any content to correct a perceived problem, add additional information, or take issue with a position. Many wiki implementations provide support for access control lists that can be applied to individual pages or to the entire site. However, successful wikis use these facilities sparingly so as not to stifle creativity and participation.
Always visible changes. Changes made to the site are immediately and globally visible.
Many small changes. The typical pattern in an active wiki amounts to many small changes made over time. A change creates a new version of a page and pages can have a history of many incremental versions.
Simplicity. Wikis provide just enough power to create content easily. This simplicity also includes few constraints, providing for maximum flexibility.

Why wikis work

Wikis are simple, both to use and to set up. The original goal was to make the creation of Web pages significantly easier than coding HTML. But, wikis are also simpler to set up and use than typical document management systems. This simplicity contributes to another success factor, the speed with which content can be created. Publish quickly and correct quickly is the mode of operation.

The open, egalitarian nature of wiki collaboration fosters a sense of empowerment among its contributors. People find that they can have an immediate effect on the collective work product. Since version history is kept for each page, each person's contributions can be identified, contributing to a sense of ownership. This revision history is very easy to access, so is a fairly prominent part of the site. It is also the key to rolling back inappropriate or damaging updates and enabling editorial oversight.

This all adds up to the key point in the preceding discussion on how wiki communities work. Wikis are analogous to open source development for documents and Web sites. They work as a collaborative content environment because they allow groups of people to collaborate in a natural way, with a build up of trust, an organic evolution of structure and content, and the aggregation of the community's knowledge.

Current use of wikis and blogs in the enterprise

The accepted definition for an enterprise wiki is the simple notion of a wiki that is used by an enterprise. It is still an emerging area with wiki providers focusing on collaboration tasks and user-driven application development. Most wiki implementations could be used within an enterprise, but those billed as enterprise wikis differ somewhat from other implementations. Usually, they integrate with enterprise identity management and storage backup, provide facilities to integrate outside content into the wiki, and include additional support for collaboration. Those delivered by software companies provide service and support, while open source implementations provide best-effort service.

Uses of enterprise wikis

Wikis are used by small- and medium-sized teams in companies of all sizes, particularly to assist with document-based collaboration. The types of uses generally fall into these categories:

Project management tools
Wikis are used to create and track all the project documentation needed to manage a team project, including project plans, schedules, status reports, specifications, how-to documents, and change proposals. Much of this usage grew from small teams creating their own inexpensive and light-weight project management solutions. It then spread to other teams. In some cases, wikis have been adopted as the basis of project management through the company.
Knowledge bases
Communities of interest within a company or institution form as result of working on common goals or using common tools or approaches. These communities benefit from collecting and sharing knowledge about the common interest. Wikis are used to collaboratively contribute to a collection of documents that capture that knowledge. These communities of interest can be a call center team, a set of project teams using the same technology or methodology, departments that need to share information between their members, and other cases where individuals gain information as they work and need to share that information to help their colleagues.
Documentation repositories
Wikis are effectively deployed to implement document repositories, especially where the documentation is rapidly and continually changing. This includes documentation that is developed as part of a project and is still in a state of flux, as well as working documentation that must always be kept up-to-date over time.

Managed content and wiki content

The choice of community tools for enterprise environments depends to a great degree on the issue of managed versus unmanaged content. A team or community in an enterprise will consider important trade-offs as they select the appropriate approach to the type of documents and method of interaction they needed. Enterprise document and Web content management tools are based on workflows, policies, administrative control, and monitoring. They seek to assure that high quality information is published and that documents are treated appropriately through their life-cycle. In direct contrast, a wiki is based on a self-managed paradigm that imposes no workflows and maximizes freedom and self-direction of the content providers. A community using a wiki will often want to assure high quality information as well, but it is an exercise in editorial oversight, not something directly supported by controls and workflows.

A wiki trades off centralized management in favor of reducing editorial effort or simplifying the workflow process. Keeping a wiki's content correct and well structured requires continual monitoring and correction. Successful wikis tend to have a person or small group assigned to monitor all changes and take corrective action to assure the quality of the site. This approach can eat up the benefits of a centralized system which aims to keep good order through approval workflows. However, many teams find the speed and team creativity enabled by a wiki environment outweigh the effort needed to keep it in good order.

You'll want to consider other differences between formal document management systems and wikis, too. These are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Difference between wikis and document management systems

	wiki	Document management
Team in control, no IT	yes	no
Information quality	Editorial oversight	Approval workflows
Document retention	User/editor discretion	Retention policy
Evolution of content and organization	Organically evolves by community updates	Content controlled by team, structure controlled by administrator
Concurrent updates	Most have no control, some have simple check out	Locking, check out

Relationship to enterprise team tools

Enterprise team tools represent instances of the document management approach. The support of communities is generally assigned to Web servers and portal servers, supported by Web content management products, or collaboration products. As discussed earlier, in Communities on the Web, a Web site or portal can present relatively static information about the community to those outside the community, as well as to host applications that support the team. But the core of community interaction tends to be around the shared information that is collaboratively created and managed. This draws attention to the tools that are in current use in the enterprise to support team collaboration.

Take the example of the IBM collaboration tools, centered on Lotus Domino, along with Lotus Domino Document Management and Lotus QuickPlace. To position these solutions, you must recognize that teams require a spectrum of flexibility, control, and administration. At one end is a wiki with little or no central administration and control. At the other end is Domino and Domino.Doc® with strict control and central administration. In the middle is QuickPlace, which includes central administration, but delegates much of the structure of the collaboration space to the users. A wiki evolves organically according to the consensus of its users, while in a Domino database or Domino Document Management, the structure is set by an administrator and the users work within those constraints. In the middle is a QuickPlace collaboration space, in which the team members can evolve the space, but aspects of the structure and interaction are usually out of their purview.

As with all online communities, enterprises should employ the proper tools in the proper roles to support their teams. A wiki can be effective in rapidly generating information, capturing knowledge, and fostering grass roots collaboration. You will need to move some documents generated through wiki collaboration to a more managed repository at the point when the documents become stable. Documents in this category include those for which business controls must be applied in order to comply with federal or state regulations. Some in this category may need to be managed in a controlled and monitored environment from their initial creation through to the end of their life-cycle. Others may be needed in automated human-processes and so must be managed in a controlled setting integrated with a workflow solution.

Application wikis

Business teams and task-oriented groups require applications to support their functions. The requirements for such applications emerge quickly and often change just as quickly. They support ad-hoc business processes, data collection and team interaction and are often disposed of after the task is complete or the needs change. This "disposable application" phenomenon is part of the trend of business teams using Web-based tools to create their own situational services and solutions. It is also an extension of one of the growing uses of wikis in the enterprise - reduction of e-mail exchanges.

Applications that are ad-hoc, team-driven and short-lived play right into the strengths of Wikis and it is likely that some form of wiki will have a central role to play in creating them. For example, JotSpot bills itself as an application wiki, providing tools, components, and templates to rapidly develop these kinds of applications. IBM is also experimenting with the concept. The idea is to enable a less technically sophisticated community -- one with very basic Web skills -- to develop the applications they need. The model is one of immediate business value to an individual or team, instant deployment, aggregation and modification by the team, and total control by the team itself.

In this model, the wiki is the development tool and the application. Team members collaborate on applications as they do with regular content. Most team members see additional markup, representing application components, that they can bring together on a page and customize through keyword parameters. A few Web technology savvy team members can write new components, also using the facilities of the application wiki.

The application wiki concept is quite new and the dynamics of its usage within a team is now well known. But, it is certainly appropriate for organizations to roll out application wikis to teams in a pilot mode. Given the grass-roots nature of wiki collaboration, there is really very little difference between a pilot and a production deployment. The wiki users will use what they find helpful.

In conclusion: Wikis help groups to get work done faster

In the dynamic environment most businesses find themselves in today, improving the pace and quality of team interaction and collaboration is increasingly important. Wikis and blogs, when used in conjunction with other community tools already deployed in the enterprise, can help build healthy, productive communities and foster effective collaboration. Organizations should consider pilot usage of wikis and blogs. They might find that their teams themselves will find the best way to use them to accomplish their work.

Resources

Learn

Wikipedia: See a wiki encyclopedia in action.
Apache Foundation main wiki: Visit this example of an open source project wiki.
Atom wiki: See this wiki site used to create a specification for an industry standard.
WikiMatrix : Review this helpful comparison of many wiki implementations -- important information to have as you consider the use of a wiki in an enterprise.
"Create a wiki system using Derby, Part 1: The basic system and regular expressions:" Take this intermediate-level tutorial and then take continue with Part 2.
JotSpot: Explore one example of an application Wiki currently available on the Web.
Web Architecture zone on developerWorks: Find articles and tutorials on various Web-based solutions. Also visit Lotus to find technical resources for Lotus software, including Lotus Domino, QuickPlace, and Domino Document Manager (Domino.Doc).