In this study, we explore the Wiki affordance of enabling shaping behavior within organizational intranets supported by Wikis. Shaping is the continuous revision of one's own and others' contributions to a Wiki. Shaping promotes knowledge reuse through improved knowledge integration. Recognizing and clarifying the role of shaping allows us to theorize new ways in which knowledge resources affect knowledge reuse. We examine the role of three knowledge resources of a Wiki contributor: knowledge depth, knowledge breadth, and assessment of the level of development of the Wiki community's transactive memory system. We offer preliminary evidence based on a sample of experienced organizational Wiki users that the three different knowledge resources have differential effects on shaping, that these effects differ from the effects on the more common user behavior of simply adding domain knowledge to a Wiki, and that shaping and adding each independently affect contributors' perceptions that their knowledge in the Wiki has been reused for organizational improvement. By empirically distinguishing between the different knowledge antecedents and consequences of shaping and adding, we derive implications for theory and research on knowledge integration and reuse.
Customer-centric business makes the needs and resources of individual customers the starting point for planning new products and services or improving existing ones. While customer-centricity has received recent attention in the marketing literature, technologies to enable customer-centricity have been largely ignored in research and theory development. In this paper, we describe one enabling technology--wikis. Wiki is a Web-based collaboration technology designed to allow anyone to update any information posted to a wiki-based Web site. As such, wikis can be used to enable customers to not only access but also change the organization's Web presence, creating previously unheard of opportunities for joint content development and "peer production" of Web content. At the same time, such openness may make the organization vulnerable to Web site defacing, destruction of intellectual property, and general chaos. In this zone of tension--between opportunity and possible failure--an increasing number of organizations are experimenting with the use of wikis and the wiki way to engage customers. Three cases of organizations using wikis to foster customer-centricity are described, with each case representing an ever-increasing level of customer engagement. An examination of the three cases reveals six characteristics that affect customer engagement--community custodianship, goal alignment among contributors, value-adding processes, emerging layers of participation, critical mass of management and monitoring activity, and technologies in which features are matched to assumptions about how the community collaborates. Parallels between our findings and those evolving in studies of the open source software movement are drawn.
The pre-choice stages of the problem solving process are more difficult to support through information systems than choice itself. Systems that facilitate problem formulation and solution finding are typically either expert system programs with narrow application domains or programs dealing with easily quantifiable problems. In contrast, this paper introduces a decision support system, GENI, that operates independent of domain, aiding the user in general problem solving tasks. The system's purpose is to support the problem solving process, rather than be a substitute for the human problem solver, by providing structure and by using different stimuli to prompt the user for data input. To deal with broad classes of complex qualitative problems, no single processing mode is sufficient. Hence the techniques in GENI differ mainly An earlier version of this paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the TwentyFourth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (IEEE Computer Society Press, 1991). This research was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant SES-9016305). We thank Nick Keenan for his assistance in developing portions of the software described in the paper. in the interface, that is, the types of stimuli displayed, and the types of data recorded. GENI's user interface is built around a standard dialog function that can be modified by means of parameter settings. Experimental results show that differences in the interface content can lead to significant differences in problemsolver performance.