A nice reference to SAP's use of wiki in the Wall Street Journal:
In the past, those people asked and sometimes answered questions in an informal way on SAP online forums, but that was an inefficient system, with people asking and answering the same questions over and over. "It got to be a little much," says Mark Yolton, vice president of the SAP Developer Network and Business Process Expert communities at SAP. Mr. Yolton's group put the most relevant questions and answers on a wiki and started encouraging people in the so-called SAP community - employees, software developers, customers and so on - to contribute.
I can think of a few places where that would make a huge amount of difference, add value, bring users in and reduce cost. But then I read about Intuit's experience:
Marie Tahir, director of the technology innovation group at Intuit Inc., has tried to get Intuit employees outside of her eight-person group to contribute to a wiki that keeps track of interesting technologies. So far, few have. So she's dangling a carrot.
Her group was formed just last year and is assigned the task of thinking of and creating innovative technologies that could later make it into products. Product managers and designers often approach her and ask to spend a few months in the group, as a sort of rotation. In the past, she hasn't had a place for nontechnical types in her group, but recently, she had an idea: Invite those people to temporarily join her group and assign them the task of building up the wiki using their writing skills. "There was a lot of excitement" when she pitched the idea, she says.
Lame. Nothing about figuring out why people are not minded to use the wiki.
SAP is providing people with a reason to engage and is doing a fine job in the process. Intuit isn't. As many have said, this is not about technology. It's not about the size of the community. It's about a different way of thinking around how to interact with the community.
Technorati Tags: Intuit, SAP, wiki
Innovation
link to original post