WikiSym 2005 Panel: Wikis in the "Consumer Enterprise"

Logistics

• This panel is part of WikiSym2005, http://www.wikisym.org/
• Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005, 01:30pm-03:00pm, Terrace Pavilion

Abstract

Enterprise software is changing before our eyes: from the way it is sold, bought and used. The model of top down, million dollar license deals with multi-million dollar service contracts sold over six to nine month sales cycles is quickly becoming a dinosaur. The new model is the "consumer enterprise" where software becomes a commodity: it is inexpensive, deployed from bottom up, lightweight, and adaptable to changing business processes. Among other reasons, wikis are gaining popularity in the enterprise because they fit into this major transition.

This panel will explore wikis in the enterprise - how they're being used, who benefits and where it's heading - and the intersection of wikis with the major trend of the consumer enterprise.

Description

In sharp contrast to the old enterprise model, the new "consumer enterprise" model considers software a commodity. Here's a quick sense of the differences between the old enterprise model and the new "consumer enterprise" vision.

Wikis are taking off as a technology. Part of the reason is that they play perfectly into this major transition. Wikis empower end users, come from the bottom up, start with a small core of committed people and grow outward, and are anywhere from free to cheap. A viral growth is typically seen within a company after people understand the value of a wiki.

A structured wiki can address some internal challenges of an enterprise: Maintenance of static Intranets; taming the internal e-mail flood; and the implementation of evolving business processes.

A wiki-based intranet empowers employees to fix content on the spot; we see a paradigm shift from webmaster maintained content to content cared for by knowledge workers and casual users.

An organization used to wikis diverts some of the e-mail traffic into the wiki. Pockets of knowledge are made available to interested parties; we see a paradigm shift from post & reply to post & refine & cross-link.

A wiki is a flexible tool that can support evolving processes. This happens in two ways. One is in the free-form wiki way -- linked pages, collaboratively maintained; the other one is with structured Wiki applications -- forms, queries, reports. Content contributors with moderate skill sets can build web applications; we see a paradigm shift from programmers create applications to domain experts building applications.

Participants

Moderator: Eugene Eric Kim, co-founder and principal of Blue Oxen Associates, a think tank and consultancy focused on improving collaboration. He has developed collaborative strategies for a number of organizations, focusing especially on inter-organizational collaboration and collaborative learning. His research centers around identifying patterns of collaboration across different domains (with a special focus on open source communities) and on improving the interoperability of collaborative tools. He is also the cocreator of PurpleWiki. Previously, Eugene worked closely with computer pioneer Doug Engelbart, who currently serves on the Blue Oxen Associates advisory board. He received his A.B. in History and Science from Harvard University.

Joe Kraus: Co-founder and CEO of JotSpot, the first application-wiki company. A long time entrepreneur, Joe has been involved with early-stage technology development and starting companies for more than twelve years. Upon graduation from Stanford University in 1993, he joined with five engineering friends to found the highly successful Internet company, Excite, Inc. The original president of Excite, Joe was deeply involved in product strategy, direction and vision as the company grew. He also held senior operational roles in business development, international development and content. After leaving Excite@Home in 2000, Joe was a co-founder of Digitalconsumer.org, a non-profit grassroots consumer organization with more than 50,000 members dedicated to protecting consumers fair-use rights to digital media. Joe, along with other co-founder Graham Spencer, continues to work on these important issues. In addition to his non-profit focus, he has also spent many years as an angel investor, working with numerous early-stage technology companies.

Peter Thoeny: Founder and primary author of TWiki, the open source wiki for the Enterprise. He is managing the project for the last six years. A software developer with over 15 years experience, Peter is specializing in software architecture, user interface design and web technology. He graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, lived in Japan for 8 years working as an engineering manager for Denso building CASE tools, and has now been in the Silicon Valley for 6 years. He manages the Knowledge Engineering group at Wind River, which has a large TWiki deployment.

Dr. Frank Weil: Manager of Software Design Automation with Motorola Global Software Group, focuses on model-driven engineering and automatic code generation. He is Chair of the Motorola Model-Driven Engineering Technical Advisory Board and has served on the Senior Executive Program OO Development Group and the Corporate AI Steering Committee. Frank has authored more than 20 refereed publications spanning a wide range of software engineering topics. He was instrumental in introducing TWikis into Motorola, and his groups use TWikis in nearly all the phases of their development processes.

Shashi Seth: Product Manager, Search Quality, with Google where he focuses on user facing features of Google Search. Before joining Google, he was Principal, Product Strategy at eBay where amongst other things, Shashi introduced eBay to the use of wiki's in the enterprise, specially for collaboration and global dissemination of information to all members of the strategy team, senior management staff, and executive staff. Shashi was also instrumental in building a strategy for eBay to utilize the power of the community to build useful content like help content, faqs, etc. Shashi was part of the team that launched Gap's online stores in the late 90s, has provided e-commerce consulting to many businesses, and worked at NASA from the late 80s through mid-90s building avionics systems and flight simulators.

-- PeterThoeny - 16 Oct 2005

Discussions