Blogs get most of the press and hype but wikis, in my opinion, have far greater potential for improving employee collaboration.

To review, a wiki is a server program that allows users to collaboratively contribute content to a website. Editing is done in your web browser using a user-friendly editing tool not too dissimilar to a stripped-down version of MS-Word. But a wiki is more collaborative than your average page authored by one person. A wiki may contain the writing, edits and additions of many, many users. Any user can edit any other users’ contributions.

The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.com which is an online encyclopedia authored by whomever wants to author. Yes, you can make your own edits and additions. Wikipedia now features over 750,000 files with thousands of contributors though they do disclose that “Nonsense and vandalism are usually removed quickly.”

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) is the international investment banking arm of Dresdner Bank. Headquartered in London and Frankfurt with offices all over the world including Sao Paulo, New York and Tokyo, DrKW employs approximately 6,000 people worldwide.

DrKW installed a wiki of their own appropriately called DrKWikipedia which is accessible from the intranet. In addition to the main wiki, there are employee blogs, Sharepoint collaboration tools and instant messaging.

Long before most of us had ever heard of it and might mistaken the moniker for a bird, DrKW installed their first wiki in 1997 to better link their large number of employees across a wide geography of locations. The wiki has since evolved into an enterprise application that all employees can use. The wiki is powered by Socialtext.

The central wiki is used primarily for project tracking by frontline employees working with customers. In other words, customer service staff working on customer files.

According to Socialtext’s case study (Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein) the DrKW Global Head of IT  JP Rangaswami says the intranet is very important for employee collaboration and also for adhering to legislative securities legislation.

"Because we are regulated we need to make sure that everything we do is recordable, archivable, searchable and retrievable. Given the market we operate in, we need to ensure that we avoid any risk of breaking down Chinese walls, prevent market abuse, correctly manage confidential information and yet still have better workflow."

The wiki is used as a communications tool, a collective discussion tool, and as a repository for documents and information. Socialtext has an excellent case study that documents the wiki’s use and success:

“The wiki has changed how team members are working and managing their projects. Before, it was common practice to create a traditional website for each project - with all the attendant problems of version control, multiple authors and HTML editing. Now, the wiki allows everyone in the team to upload information more easily. This encourages more collaboration and transparency through facilitating the sharing of email conversations, small snippets of information and ideas which would otherwise have either been communicated in person (an effective but non-persistent methodology) or have completely fallen through the cracks.

An important role of the wiki is to track project development so that the team and management know what progress is being made on projects regardless of any individual's geographical location. This has raised awareness across the team of what each person is doing, the status of each project, and what actions need to be taken.

One of the biggest users of Socialtext in DrKW is the Equity Delta1 equity financing team -- led by Darren Lennard, Global Co-Head -- which deals with stock loans, equity swaps, and structured equity-like financing.

The team suffered from having too much email to deal with, which made communication clumsy and difficult. They neededed a collaborative working methodology for the development of business plans and for process analysis. They also needed to have some way of storing commonly-used information that was more usable than a simple file dump.

Equity Delta1 uses the Socialtext workspace in a number of ways.

As new topics come up, such as which clients they cover or how they analyse their business, they create an open forum where anyone can post views, comments and questions on given subjects. When it matures, the discussion becomes a formal page. They also use the wiki to publish and share white papers and bulletins, coordinating sales and marketing activities, and discussing and organizing critical team tasks.

Because discussion is now happening on the wiki, email usage has dropped significantly. The Equity Delta1 team's intention is to make Socialtext their sole means of communication and indeed they are already using it daily.

However, the team are still learning how best to use Socialtext, and still see it as an equivalent to shared folders and files rather than as a more versatile collaboration tool. There has also been resistance to the openness of the wiki. The Delta1 workspace is separate to the DrKWikipedia (which is accessible to any employee of DrKW), and without this privacy, Lennard believes that his team would not have adopted it so rapidly. But once use of the Delta1 wiki matures, it will be ported over to the DrKWikipedia wiki.

Streamlining specification and documentation development

The E-Capital London Team develops back-end applications for the Digital Markets business line and supports a number of legacy systems. They had been using SharePoint to share and discuss documents, but have now migrated to Socialtext.

They are primarily using Socialtext to share and develop new system specifications, product overviews and help documentation. The wiki provides them with an instantly editable collaboration platform which obviates the need to constantly upload and reupload new files and images to a staging server, and put them through user acceptance testing before progressing to a production server, thus simplifying the publication process.

They also find the version history function useful, particularly on product specs where it is important to retain a full change audit trail.

In the future, the team hopes to be able to share code with other developers within the company to help both improve their applications and also avoid unnecessary duplication of effort.

Bridging global offices

DrKW is a global entity, and Socialtext has helped to bridge the many offices together across time zones and cultural divides. Because different cultures react in different ways to different communications media, it has been essential to not only provide a variety of ways for people to communicate, but also create a central intranet area where they can easily share information. Socialtext also enables individuals to edit the intranet without having to wait for a central team to update an HTML page.

But JP Rangaswami believes the true value of Socialtext has yet to emerge.

"Hidden within the wiki is a drive towards creating an internal glossary that will transform life, so if someone doesn't understand something they can look it up and find it defined not by a dictionary but by someone else doing a similar job."

This Wikipedia-style usage will cut down the training time and start-up costs of new hires as it will help them to understand internal and external jargon and terms more easily. It will also simplify the roles of people writing in other locations and languages. English is the language of DrKW at present, but in the future Rangaswami foresees multilingual support.

DrKW recently rolled out to over 4000 users, but it is allowing takeup to develop gradually, providing informal training to encourage rather than enforce usage. Indeed, emergent use is accepted as a valuable part of the spread of wiki culture - one team's first use of the wiki was to organise their coffee rota, which they had previously done by email. Reducing email use even in such a seemingly trivial manner has a positive knock-on effect on users' productivity and ability to manage their workload by reducing the volume of non-essential messages. It also provides an innocuous "practice run" that can facilitate the adoption of similar strategies in situations closer to core aspects of work.

Over time, DrKW intends to use technologies such as blogs, wikis and search to mold their entire approach to customer service and project planning. Rather than using monolithic systems to solve these problems, the intent is to create an ecosystem of tools which, alongside the use of more granular permissioning, will allow information to be shared across silos. The value of this approach to problem solving, incident management and project planning/execution will be vast.”