Q&A

Enterprise Wikis Seen As a Way to End 'Reply-All' E-Mail Threads

Socialtext's president and co-founder talks about wikis as an enterprise collaboration tool and what wikis mean to companies, their IT departments, and a whole new generation of workers.

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By C.G. Lynch

PAGE 3

The second use case is a participatory knowledge base. So at Dell, for instance, we did a knowledge base for their call center. Their call center handles exceptions. That's what they do all day long. Answer a call, hear the problem, look for an answer, and then they don't have the information. Now, [with a wiki], they tap the informal network that exists inside the call center and document the solution. 99 percent of the pages created [on the wiki] and tagged allow the call center to go from 20 clicks to find information to four, substantially decreasing search costs and decreasing the average call time by 10 to 20 percent.

The third area is flexible client collaboration. This is a professional services firm or other kind of group that sets up a collaborative workspace between them and the client. The fourth is business social networks, which is similar to collaborative intelligence. But instead of it being with the field, it's with your business partners or it's with your customers, where you're communicating to them, getting feedback from them, and they're interacting directly.

Social software companies often have a strange relationship with IT, seeing as line of business users can yank out the corporate credit card and buy your product as a hosted, Software as a Service (SaaS) offering. How do you interact with CIOs and IT departments?

Mayfield: We do demand engagement by line of business managers. We have a model where we have an open source version that anybody can grab, download, and install on their own for free. We have a SaaS version which has Socialtext Personal, which is free for up to six users. And the professional version, which is on a subscription SaaS basis, people could be using that without involving IT whatsoever. Our bread and butter, though, is our onsite deployments. We have a managed service appliance. We do pilots, for example, for less than $5,000 for 90 days for up to 100 users to get started. Those appliances &mdash you just drop it in and in ten minutes you're up and running.

Five years ago, we didn't deal with IT at all. But now we end up working with IT because it's an inevitability. We have things like an admin dashboard that we developed for IT, but pretty much every other feature beyond that is flat and accessible by every single other user. And that's purposeful, because otherwise what you end up doing is creating tools of control, and tools of control creates a barrier to collaboration. If you want to accomplish very big things with technology, it's not just IT; it's line of business management engaging the base of stakeholders and champions. I need to work with marketing or sales ops and somebody from the field to prototype and create the solution with them to give them literacy around it.