OFFICE COLLABORATION, THE WIKI WAY
Businesses have begun to investigate Wikipedia’s underlying technology as a way to share knowledge.
By John Edwards

“Wiki”, the Hawaiian word for “quick”, is also the name for collaborative websites that let users add and edit content quickly and easily.

The best-known of these collaborative sites is Wikipedia, a multilingual web-based encyclopedia. Unlike conventional online reference works, which are updated on regular schedules by professional writers and editors, Wikipedia is written entirely by volunteers and allows most articles to be changed, edited, or updated by any user at any time. This continual, “community-oriented” publishing approach has enabled it to become the world’s largest and most current encyclopedia – though hardly the most accurate, say detractors.

As Wikipedia’s popularity has soared, businesses have begun to investigate its underlying technology as a way to share business and financial knowledge among employees, suppliers, and customers. Why use highly structured content management software, they reason, when a wiki’s collaborative process can get the job done faster and easier?

Some software providers are already taking the hint. Stellent recently added features to its universal content management application that will allow businesses to build their own internal wikis on top of a web-based content-management platform. Another company, iUpload, is offering a new version of its Enterprise Blogging Suite, which connects wiki and blogging software to compliance, work flow, and other content management processes. “For small work groups, wikis fill the space between emails, which are hard to follow and manage, and formal content management tools,” says Robin Hooper, iUpload’s founder and CEO.

The search is over

Kate Trgovac, a web manager at oil and gas company Petro-Canada, believes that wikis can pick up where company-based blogs leave off. Using iUpload’s software, Petro-Canada plans to transfer hard-to-search blog entries and comments into indexed wiki articles. “Our purchasing group, for instance, wants to capture ideas on negotiating better contracts and setting pricing across our dealer network,” Trgovac says. “We think wikis will work just fine.”

Expanding on Petro-Canada’s ideas, Stellent’s vice president of product management, Todd Price, suggests that intranet wikis and blogs can be used as complementary technologies. “You could use a wiki to create a competitive analysis or review documentation online,” while using a blog “to gather immediate feedback from employees, partners and customers about new product features,” he explains.

Strengths and weaknesses

True, the very feature that has made wikis so popular – their ability to enable almost anyone create or edit information – can also be a weakness. When no editor vets user contributions for honesty or accuracy, readers can easily be misled, innocently or intentionally. Indeed, after numerous edits by congressional staffers in the US to the Wikipedia entries of their senators and representatives – as well as the entries of congressional rivals – the online encyclopedia implemented a one-week block on access originating from the House and Senate offices, according to published accounts.

Price insists, however, that wiki veracity will be much less problematic in the business world than on the public web. “In a corporate setting, the experts are the people controlling the wiki,” he notes. “They’re going to challenge any content that isn’t accurate.” For her part, Trgovac expects to see plenty of give and take in Petro-Canada’s wikis. “That’s the whole idea,” she says. “To get people to share ideas, collaborate, and arrive at a consensus.”

And, presumably, to leave their partisan politics at the door..

IT SECURITY
OFFICE TOYS

MP3 players, camera phones, wireless notebooks, pocket messengers: these and a swarm of other seemingly innocuous high-tech gadgets can stir up a hornet’s nest of trouble at the office. Company computer systems might always be stung by dangerous software or data, of course, but more common is the threat that proprietary information might simply fly out the door. Indeed, when employees bring personal electronic devices to work, the potential loss of productivity pales beside the threat to corporate security.

Managers who would never dream of allowing a portable tape recorder into a strategy planning session might not give a second look at an MP3 player, even though it could be equipped with a digital recorder of its own. A personal computer that seemed well-protected behind the network firewall could have data siphoned away by a USB drive slipped surreptitiously into the machine when heads were turned.

The dark side

“Gadget threats are proliferating as rapidly as the devices themselves,” claims David Friedlander, a senior analyst at US-based technology research company Forrester Research. He acknowledges that devices snapped up by early-adopter employees can alert businesses to new, potentially useful technologies. Indeed, says Friedlander, “important innovations like notebook computers, mobile phones, and digital cameras were all once considered off-the-wall gadgets and were all once sneaked into offices.”

He cautions, though, that just about every such device “has a dark side”. The security breaches created by these gadgets, it turns out, are caused more often by mistake than by malice. Take the case of a former vice president of mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, who offered his old BlackBerry “as is” on eBay. The banking executive forgot that the device contained more that 200 internal emails, not to mention a database of names, job titles, and contact information for more than 1,000 company executives worldwide. (One might say that he forgot what the definition of “as is” is.)

Fortunately, the winning bidder was a computer consultant who was honest enough not to exploit the information. But the story highlights the fact “that the people who are most likely to have gadgets are also the ones most likely to handle sensitive information,” observes Friedlander.

Policing policies

Allen Carey, an analyst at US-based technology research firm IDC, says that frequently updated corporate guidelines on personal technology can help to swat down problems before they cause serious harm. “Businesses need to keep pace with emerging mobile technologies and regularly communicate revised policies to their employees,” relates Carey. “You might, for instance, want to specifically block employees from downloading to USB drives or bringing unauthorized portable devices into the office.”

In light of Morgan Stanley’s close shave, a growing number of businesses is requiring employees who leave the company to sign an agreement affirming that they have deleted all confidential corporate information in their possession. A few even go so far as to insist that departing employees erase mobile-device data in the presence of onlooking company officials.

With business-critical information at stake, insists Friedlander, companies can’t afford to ignore the threat posed by personal technology. “The price of a secure business in this mobile-device era is ongoing diligence and vigilance,” he says.