Wikis to take over corporate America, claims Gartner

By Graeme Burton

Gartner analyst Kathy Harris has forecast that half of all US companies will have deployed wiki technology by 2009.

Wikis, best exemplified by the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, are online information sites that enable anyone to login and update entries. Much of this growth will be driven as a result of the integration of wiki features into common collaboration packages, especially Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and IBM’s Lotus Sametime. With the technology integrated with such applications, many organisations will find it relatively straightforward to adopt wikis.

There are also a range of wiki applications from a number of smaller vendors, such as Jotspot, Socialtext, CustomerVision and Klir, as well as open source software offerings, which are freely downloadable over the internet.

However, the adoption of wikis is not being driven by senior executives, according to Andrew McAfee, an associate professor of technology and operations management at the Harvard Business School. He suggests that growth to date has been driven by business leaders at a departmental level implementing them as a relatively cheap and easy means of supporting local projects because they don’t typically require expensive and disruptive roll-outs.

In a departmental context, staff can use the wiki to update other people in the project, and some packages even enable users to attach documents, generate blogs and even export wiki pages into e-mails.