JP Rangaswami is the former global CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW). He played the principle role in implementing an enterprise wiki on the Socialtext platform at DrKW which has been the subject of numerous articles. He has written a brief overview of the some of the benefits experienced at DrKW in Computing Business:
We have, as far as it is possible to verify these things, the largest internal corporate wiki in existence. More than 3,000 pages have been created by our staff, and more than 1,800 users – some 30 per cent of the bank’s workforce – access and use the wiki.
His assesssment focuses not only on the softer 'collaboration' benefits but also makes several points about email reduction (75%) and productivity gains (sorry, no measures offered). A few quotes from the article....
But what are the tangible benefits? With the wiki, the most interesting results have been seen in day-to-day changes to the way people do business, and that have a direct effect on productivity.
Once users started hosting meeting agendas on the wiki, they began to see a direct benefit in terms of productivity. The agenda was always up to date and people were much more likely to make dynamic changes to it.
It is a minor change in perception but the results are tangible. The wiki counters what you might call the ‘conference room questions’ problem, where people have important ideas, information and questions to contribute but do not want to be seen to do so directly.
These are small changes to the way people work, but through better collaboration and communication, small changes soon add up and make a real difference to productivity. When a wiki is set up to serve a certain project, email volume relating to that project drops by 75 per cent.
While I agree with most of JP's points, I'd have to disagree with his egregious boast about having the 'largest corporate wiki in existence'! How could he possibly know that? I'm not sure much verification has gone on here. Surprisingly, noone asked me ;)
We (Atlassian) have a fair number of clients running enterprise wikis on Confluence with more than 1800 users. There are at least 5 to 10 I can list off the top of my head, and I'm sure there are more I don't know about.
And as for the "3000 pages" claim - I'd guess our own extranet has almost that many pages and we only have 50 staff.
If he means the largest _SocialText_ installation inside a corporation, I'll give him that. If he's claiming the largest _wiki_ in any corporation, it's BS.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Cannon-Brookes | 07/17/2006 at 04:30 PM