Note: This story is available on both Industrial Market Trends and the International Association of Online Communicators Blog. We will share comments from both audiences in order to open up the dialogue and share ideas in true blog and wiki fashion.

When we started this week we focused mostly on the different uses of blogs.  It is time to give the wiki-wiki or wiki a fair hearing.  Created by Oregon programmer Ward Cunningham in 1995, wikis have taken off over the last couple of years. Wikis are named after the shuttle buses at Honolulu Airport and means quick.  And in many ways wikis are created and edited and re-edited at Internet speeds.  The power of a wiki is to extract the collective intelligence of a social network to create documents.  These documents can include everything from encyclopedia articles to project development and everything in between.

One of the more famous wikis is Wikipedia.  Wikipedia describes itself as a "free-content encyclopedia, written collaboratively by people from around the world."  The site can be edited by anyone on the Internet and it is self correcting by the Internet.  Launched on January 15, 2001, today there are over 600,000 English language articles and well over 1,000,000 articles in multiple languages.  The process is not static since Wikipedia claims daily activity at hundreds of thousands of visitors making tens of thousands of edits and creating thousands of new articles.

The question is how does this apply to businesses.  There are many examples today of companies using wikis for brainstorming, tracking of projects and the creation and editing of corporate documents.  An article appeared a year ago in Business Week entitled Something Wiki This Way Comes.  It sites examples of companies such as Eastman Kodak, Walt Disney and Motorola using wiki technologies to enhance collaboration.

The benefits of this collaborative approach are many including cutting daily phone calls, e-mails and reducing meeting time.  With the Internet 24x7, field offices around the world can contribute to company documents and projects.  A wiki promotes consensus across the enterprise where blogs are a place to share opinions.  Other benefits include creating a community within the corporation that is not restricted to physical location.  It provides a forum for employees to share information as good corporate citizens as well as tapping previously unknown internal resources.

The creation or response to documents like Request For Proposals (RFP) can be facilitated and expedited through the use of wiki technology.  Instead of routing e-mail and consolidating feedback and then rerouting the updated document for more changes, an RFP can be posted and multiple departments can collaborate almost simultaneously with the changes happening in real time.  Changes are tracked so versioning is not an issue.

SocialText, a supplier of blog and wiki technology to the enterprise has some interesting case studies on their site.  An interesting case study is Stata Labs where they were able to greatly reduce product cycle times.  The opportunity to create a shared knowledge base across a global company helped Stata achieve better communication and support for their employees.  Other suppliers of enterprise wiki technology include:

Wikis and blogs are just beginning to get a foothold in corporate America.  It will be interesting to watch these technologies evolve.  Here are some interesting links on corporate wikis:

We are coming to the end of this joint series between ThomasNet Industrial Newsroom and International Association of Online Communicators.  Tomorrow I will share comments and opinions from both blogs.