The Wiki: an environment to revolutionise employees' interaction with corporate knowledge. - 0 views
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Sian Cooper on 21 Mar 12Hasan, H., & Pfaff, C.C. (2006). The wiki: an environment to revolutionise employees' interaction with corporate knowledge. OZCHI. 11(24-26). Pp377-380. Retrieved 19th March 2012 from http://www.ozchi.org/proceedings/2006/sessions/short-papers/social/hasan-p377.pdf This article focuses on collaborative social software, such as wikis, being used by members to communicate and collaborate electronically within corporate organisations. The authors use the term Knowledge Management (KM) to describe the ways in which wikis can be used within these organisations to share knowledge, create content, distribute documents and edit files. The advantages of using wikis within corporate organisations are that knowledge can be shared quickly and efficiently, allowing editing of pages to be recorded and information to be kept up-to-date. New pages are able to be created and old ones deleted. Editing of pages and knowledge contribution is relatively easy when employing a wiki, even for the novice user. Overall the "wiki takes advantage of the collaborative efforts of all members of the organisation to create an effective library of knowledge" (p.378). Major corporations such as IBM, the Disney Corporation, and British Telecommunications, are three major organisations that have been noted to employ wikis to assist with KM amongst workers. However, some corporate organisations choose not to employ wikis to organise KM for a number of reasons. wikis may appear to change the organisational structure within companies such that "senior executives may be reluctant to share power with their subordinates" (p.379). There are issues surrounding intellectual property and quality control of information. Privacy concerns also come into play, and conflict may arise if workers are contributing more information or less information to the wiki than other employees. However the authors note that through offering corporate incentives, implementing revision control, and employing u
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Mitchell Houwen on 25 Mar 12Corporate knowledge pertains to the inside information that companies need to operate. Internal wikis allow companies to coordinate and collaborate their internal information to streamline the normal business processes. This also allows businesses to spread their business network across many areas and still work cohesively on a common task. Wikipedia can be considered one enormous organization that serves the single purpose of supplying information to the entire globe through the detailed and yet at the same time brief articles. Global networks like this are true representations of collaboration and how steps can be taken in an effort to allow and access the knowledge of crowds. The knowledge of crowds is an idea that there is a bank of information that can be attained by taking the small pieces that each person in the crowd holds. Can corporations use wikis effectively to store information? Who holds the power? With any type of wiki it is important to remember that someone must be in charge of moderating and filtering the information. Or if a wiki is used inside a corporation does that remove the need for a person in charge of filtering? Either way a wiki can be an effective tool in allowing businesses to collaborate without the need to be in the same geographic location.