None of the four cases briefly described above presents a complete success story of a corporate wiki, although the level of achievement improves from Case One to Case Four. In Cases One, Two and Three we are dealing with traditional, conservative public sector organisations for all of which conversational technologies are relatively new and not well understood. The educational institution of Case One expressed most concern for the open nature of a wiki and rejected its use outright. The Health Department Unit of Case Two was receptive to the use of a wiki, perhaps because of positive results from its online discussion forum, but was still cautious about giving full consent to the wiki project without further deliberation. They could see benefits from the generated joint and voluntary collaboration that would enable them to capture and generate up-to-date professional knowledge but were wary of how they would ensure quality control of the output if they were to put it on their public website. Standards Australia, as discussed in Case Three, was concerned about developing a Knowledge Management System that would manage the exhaustive generation of the content and editing work that went with the presentation of its publications. Standards Australia managers were quite enthusiastic about the use of a wiki, both to collect content and to make it publicly available. However, they did not have the final responsibility for the knowledge that would end up in small businesses because the wiki would be hosted outside the organisation and ultimately be part of a research endeavour. They were, however, nevertheless prepared to have their organisation’s name associated with the wiki.

It is from Case Four that most can be learnt about the benefits and challenges of the corporate wiki since it is already in operation. First, they have overcome resistance of management to having this type of technological system and the wiki was given senior level management support. In contrast to the concerns of the other cases, their main problem was to get employees to use it so that issues of the balance between control and trust have not yet been faced. Research has been commissioned by the wiki sponsor to analyse employees’ ability and willingness to use and contribute to the wiki. There is some indication that the wiki may challenge management authority through the attempt to engage the knowledge worker in a more participatory knowledge management capability and environment. An action research approach will be used to determine the ability of the corporate wiki to drive and enable the democratisation of information and knowledge and where there is a change to a culture that says that knowledge management is the responsibility of all workers.

Drucker observes that ‘… fewer and fewer people are subordinates — even in fairly low-level jobs. Increasingly they are knowledge workers. Knowledge workers cannot be managed as subordinates; they are associates… This difference is more than cosmetic. Once beyond the apprentice stage, knowledge workers must know more about their job than their boss does — or what good are they? The very definition of a knowledge worker is one who knows more about his or her job than anyone else in the organisation’ (Drucker, 1998). However, he goes on to say that, ‘the productivity of the knowledge worker is still abysmally low. It has probably not improved in the past 100 or even 200 years-for the simple reason that nobody has worked at improving the productivity. All our work on productivity has been on the productivity of the manual worker. The way one maximises their performance is by capitalising on their strengths and their knowledge rather than trying to force them into moulds’. It could be that new ICT tools such as the wiki can both drive and enable changes to this effect within organisations.

The characteristic of IS that distinguishes it from other management fields in the social sciences is that it concerns the use of ‘artifacts in human-machine systems’ (Gregor, 2002). Conversely, the characteristic that distinguishes IS from more technical fields, such as Computer Science and Information Technology, is its concern for the human elements in organisational and social systems. The field of IS emerged in the 1970s when there was a need to have more rigorous and scientific methodologies for building organisational computer-based systems that accurately represented the data and processes of the real world. Since that time IS research has drawn its significance from the uniqueness of computer-based information and communication tools and their place in shaping recent human, social and organisational history.

The information systems of the 20th century are now firmly entrenched as basic infrastructure in most organisations. However, in the 21st century computer-based tools will continue to change so advances in the IS field will only result from a better understanding of the latest types of applications; who is using them, how they are being used and for what purposes. Conversational technologies such as wikis can readily be set up and used effectively with no assistance or guidance from organisational IT service units. This poses a whole new set of issues of ownership and authority that challenges existing organisational cultures and power structures. We believe that this is an exciting time for IS to take on a whole new relevance for organisations and for a world where the technology increasingly empowers the individual, and consequently democratises organisational information and knowledge.