Enterprise wikis as a means of creating business value: The impact of the CIO

Abstract: Mass collaboration has been made possible through social networking tools likewikis. With features that support the principles wikinomics, wikis are enabling largenumber of people to participate in the production process without necessarily beingat the same physical location. Organizations and IT managers are beginning to har-ness this new technology in a way that will create business value for their companies,helping them to produce goods and services that are valuable for their customers.This research sets out to explore the business values of using wikis in enterprises, andhow the CIOs and other IT managers who are responsible for handling the IT/IS re-sources of their firms leverage wikis to create business value. This was accomplishedby examining collaborations on wikis from two different perspectives: Firstly, fromthe CIO or IT manager’s perspective where we gathered their own views about thebusiness values of wikis and also assess their own impact on creating those businessvalues. Secondly, we examined the business values of wikis from the user’s perspec-tive by gathering the views of different wiki users.The main contribution of this research is to identify if any, the business values thatare obtained from using wikis in enterprises and to ascertain the impact of the CIOon the business values that are being created.