This research project was planned as a piece of action research in which the researchers would participate in the setting up of a wiki in the organisation and observe its contribution to knowledge management. When it became apparent that management support would not be forthcoming, the research plan was altered to identify and examine the reasons for the organisation’s reluctance to proceed with the wiki project.

The organisation was a small educational institution with less than 200 employees. It had developed a centralised knowledge portal from which employees drew heavily, accessing previous reports and research papers, work plans, project schedules and best practices that were critical to customer support. The employees of the organisation perceived drawbacks with this system concerning the risk of information overload and deterioration of the quality of information. It was also time-consuming to read everything that purported to be relevant information since the search engine yielded far too many hits or the keywords gave unanticipated meanings. Sometimes, a user might not get any hits at all if they did not know the precise keywords to use.

The institution had few resources to address the challenges posed by the knowledge portal, and could not afford an expensive knowledge management system. They initially welcomed the chance to set up a wiki as part of our study of the adoption of corporate wikis for knowledge management projects. The wiki was seen by some as a tool to cause a major transformation in the way the institution would manage knowledge resources, while keeping in mind its constraints. However, it was not long before management decided to cancel the project and reject the wiki concept outright.

Much of what has been discussed above regarding the merits of promoting an open democratic approach to knowledge sharing has been ignored by this organisation, which favours a traditional organisational structure. Management were concerned that the use of a wiki might flatten the organisational hierarchy, changing traditional and hierarchical communication channels (Stenmark, 2003) and, if knowledge is power, then senior executives were reluctant to share this power with their subordinates. The organisation did not offer cultural support such as reward and recognition programs for the sharing of knowledge.

It was noted that the organisation favoured a top down management approach, which can be seen as antagonistic to the democratisation of knowledge. There are a number of reasons for centralised control. In particular, the organisation maintained that its existing approach to documentation management offers better quality control with its formal editing opportunities, review and verification stages. Their implementation of specific objectives in this regard makes it a simple task to ensure local compliance and checking to see if these objectives have been met.

The potential for ‘wiki vandalism’ was another reason cited by the organisation for its reluctance to implement a wiki. Vandalism involves editing a wiki in a wilful and destructive manner to deface the website or change the content to include incorrect or irrelevant material. Since the wiki would have no internal organisational or social boundaries, the opportunities for vandalism might be overwhelming. The insertion of spam links and false or malicious content about groups or individuals were considered possible violations as well. Concern was expressed regarding how the organisation could be assured that the information on a wiki was credible and correct. However, what management overlooked was the fact that ‘wiki vandalism’ generally occurs on public wikis. They would not address matters of responsibility and accountability as expected from each employee.

This case was motivated by an ongoing project, in a central Coordination and Monitoring Unit for the Intensive Care Units (ICUs) of a State Heath System in Australia. More specifically, it was to develop a Web-based service to meet the information needs of administrators and clinicians in ICUs of their public hospitals. Material posted on the website was carefully developed and controlled by specially appointed expert committees. At the same time, the Coordination and Monitoring Unit started up an online discussion forum that grew in popularity with ICU professionals. Membership included clinicians from the state hospital and ICU professionals from hospitals in other states and countries. Discussions on this list included valuable information and advice on topics of immediate concern, but these were archived in a generic form and were difficult to access at a later date.

From time to time, the Coordination and Monitoring Unit considered the possibility of extracting text on given topics from the discussion lists and using it to produce formal material to be posted on the website. However using the current procedures, this would have involved constituting a relevant expert committee to edit and evaluate the material into a formal document that would pass the quality control demanded for posting on the website. Resources were not available to do this. An alternative suggestion was to install a wiki and allow members of the discussion groups to transfer suitable sets of postings into the wiki where members could edit it themselves into a document to go up on the public website. Although this solution was approved in principle, and technically could be set up quite quickly, progress in the near future is unlikely for reasons not dissimilar to those described in Case One. Government health departments are notoriously conservative and risk averse, and do not have the flexibility or agility to approve implementation of such a, to them, unknown technology without long deliberation.

The Business and Management Division of Standards Australia has recently produced descriptive standards in areas such as governance, knowledge management, risk management and so on. These have been readily adopted in large private and public organisations, but not by small businesses where they are seen as costly, inappropriate and irrelevant. A committee for Small Business was established to produce material to address this problem but did not have a clear direction or the necessary resources to do this because of the traditional approaches that were adopted. A wiki project was therefore suggested as a solution that could be implemented at low cost by a research student; it could be set up by the student and seeded with summary material from the various Business Standards. Suitable members of the small business community would be invited to add experiences, advice, and so on, to this material to build up a body of knowledge on topics having an appropriate focus on small business issues. The material could be monitored and edited by members of the committee and the result could then be made available at no cost to small business managers. This project is currently underway and has the makings of an ideal research endeavour in demonstrating the use of a corporate wiki.

This project investigates employee perceptions of the role and value of an existing wiki set up for knowledge management of the Research Division of a large multinational corporation. As typical knowledge workers, employees in this division were deemed to require new awareness and skills in knowledge management but their supervisors were not sure how to give employees the resources and authority for this. The wiki was established by the Research Division’s Knowledge Management Officer to allow employees to access the Division's documents, plans, reports, and other resources, and enables them to create and share new knowledge on current and past work activities. However, the wiki is not being used as originally intended by the employees.

A team of researchers were invited to study the employees’ use of, and attitudes towards, the wiki within the organisational reality of how they do their work, solve problems, and acquire new knowledge. The project brings together the expertise of investigators in information systems knowledge management and organisational learning and aims to develop a model in the context of an industry partner’s whole knowledge management strategy. At this stage, research funding is being sought for this project and the authors intend to report in more detail on the progress of this project at a later stage.