Collaborative Business - The effects of Wikis on collaboration practices in organizations Master Thesis, 15 Credits, Department of Informatics Presented: June, 2008 Authors: Osama Mansour Sahar Monavari Supervisor: Mia Sassén Examiners: Linda Öberg Hans Lundin Lund University Informatics Collaborative Business - The effects of Wikis on collaboration practices in organizations © Osama Mansour © Sahar Monavari Master thesis, presented June 2008 Size: 80 pages Supervisor: Mia Sassén Abstract Wikis and other web 2.0 technologies are increasingly used in business. In this sense, the overall purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of wikis on collaboration and the impact of collaboration on organizational innovation. Four interviews have been conducted with IS managers as well as regular Wiki users in different organizations to show how can wikis affect collaboration and exploit innovation. The results showed that the Wiki is used as a shared platform for collaboration and the ability to participate in the process of knowledge creation in an iterative manner helped in generating more ideas which leads to more innovation. We concluded that the Wiki affects the nature and context of collaboration. The research showed that the use of the wiki for internal collaboration purposes helped organizations to benefit from collective intelligence through allowing everyone within a team or a project to contribute and share ideas and experiences. Also, it showed the use of wikis for external use might be associated with problems such as the reluctance of collaborators to participate in the group work and other problems related to data quality and organizations won’t use it for more open use where information is opened for people outside the organization. Keywords Wikis, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Peer Production, Organizations, Innovation, Creativity. i ACKNOLEDGMENTS ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ This research completes our master thesis for the Master Program in Information Systems during the spring semester of 2008 at Lund University – Department of Informatics. Mia Sassén, our supervisor, has been supervising us throughout this research and we would like to express our special gratitude for her continuous support and guidance. Also we would like to thank Hans Lundin for his supporting role within the supervision team to keep up the good work. Many thanks for our colleagues from team two for their delightful and inspiring meetings. We also would like to thank Daniel Terborn from Capgemini, Jonas Ledendal from Aescapia AB, Katarina Scanta and Sophie Albrechtson from Lund University for participating in this research and their insightful support. In addition, great love, appreciation, and respect for our parents who have traveled long distances to come and support us in person while finishing this work. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 1. Introduction..................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Overview............................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Problem Area and Research Questions................................................................. 2 1.3 Research Purpose.................................................................................................. 2 1.4 Target Audience.................................................................................................... 2 1.5 Delimitations......................................................................................................... 2 2. Wikis............................................................................................................................... 3 2.1 The Use of Wikis in Organizations: Enterprise 2.0 .............................................. 3 2.2 Wikis: Definition .................................................................................................. 5 2.3 Characteristics of Wikis........................................................................................ 6 2.3.1 Collaboration using e-mails and Wikis.............................................................. 7 2.3.2 Wiki and an Intranet powered by Content Management Systems..................... 8 2.4 Wikipedia Factor: Accuracy and openness in Enterprise 2.0 ............................... 8 2.5 Collaboration: Challenges and barriers............................................................... 10 2.6 Grassroots adoption: Starting a successful Wiki at the workplace..................... 11 2.6.1 Wiki Pilot......................................................................................................... 12 2.6.2 Large-scale adoption........................................................................................ 13 2.7 Wiki beyond Knowledge Management: KM 2.0................................................ 14 2.8 Reliability and Trustworthiness of collaborative Wiki content .......................... 16 3. Wikinomics: The New Era of Mass Collaboration....................................................... 18 3.1 Wikinomics: The rise of a new era of collaboration........................................... 18 3.2 Principles of Wikinomics.................................................................................... 19 3.3 Models of Mass Collaboration............................................................................ 20 3.4 The Wiki Workplace........................................................................................... 21 4. Collective Intelligence .................................................................................................. 23 4.1 Intelligence of Crowds: We Are Smarter Than Me............................................ 23 4.2 Information Sharing in Organizations ................................................................ 23 4.2.1 Coordination Issues.......................................................................................... 25 4.2.2 Cooperation Issues........................................................................................... 25 4.2.3 Cognition Issues............................................................................................... 26 4.3 Conditions required for group intelligence......................................................... 26 4.3.1 Diversity........................................................................................................... 27 4.3.2 Independence ................................................................................................... 27 4.3.3 Decentralization ............................................................................................... 28 4.4 Groups and innovation........................................................................................ 29 5. Research Methodology ................................................................................................. 31 5.1 Research Approach ............................................................................................. 31 5.2 Data Collection ................................................................................................... 31 5.3 Semi-structured interviews ................................................................................. 31 5.4 Data Analysis...................................................................................................... 32 5.5 Research Quality................................................................................................. 34 5.6 Research Ethics................................................................................................... 34 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 5.6.1 Informed consent ............................................................................................. 35 5.6.2 Confidentiality ................................................................................................. 35 5.6.3 Avoiding harm and doing good, (beneficence)................................................ 36 5.6.4 Voluntary ......................................................................................................... 36 5.6.5 Avoiding research misconducts ....................................................................... 36 5.7 Reduction of Bias................................................................................................ 36 6. Empirical Findings....................................................................................................... 38 6.1 Interviews............................................................................................................ 38 6.1.1 Interview One: Lund University/ Web publisher............................................. 38 6.1.1.1 Description.................................................................................................... 38 6.1.1.2 Interview Analysis ........................................................................................ 38 6.1.2 Interview Two: Aescapia