The Avenue A / Razorfish Case Study of Wiki Implementation

The presentation below is a great example of a successful wiki implementation that does provide me with useful information related to my (still incubating) project to propose a wiki to my employer for a better management and utilization of customer knowledge. Obviously, it is not a perfect comparison, Avenue A/Razorfish being an IT company with many offices all around the globe and managing projects. In that sense, I think a wiki made a lot of sense to them and perhaps the type of employees they have ar emore open to wiki usage. But regardless, the communication of their exeperience is very useful.

Here is what do I take away from that slideshow :

1. The targeted users must already feel a strong need to collaborate and be somewhat frustrated with the existing tools like emails, central folders, intranet … well open to experimentation;
2. The wiki launch must be supported with a strong positioning strategy and integrated with other entreprise 2.0 tools like blogs;
3. The wiki acceptation process can be improved by allowing everyone to participate and even accept personal pages;
4. The results of the wiki implementation should be measurable and concrete to the users, which was obviously the case here;
5. Training users and having wiki events will increase the chances of success;
6. Do not underestimate the technology challenges, be prepared to invest significant time in this project;

A Wiki for Customer Knowledge in my Company?

Here is the picture : my job is to create and communicate customer knowledge in a somewhat traditional company. I’m new on the job so I want to improve the way we do things without shocking my colleagues my what could be seen seen as the “this guy wants to impress us to much” syndrom. But, in fact, it’s obvious we are not optimizing the way all the customer knowledge we create is being used for effective marketing decision making.

So, here I am toying with the idea of introducing Entreprise 2.0 wiki and blog concepts. I feel both could be excellent for knowledge sharing, interaction, reporting, meeting planning, well a new way of getting a return of investiment on the market research, statistical analysis and competitive intelligence work my team does. I realize moving forward with this could be suicidal. I’m not sure I would be able to create adoption, participation and intense interaction. But you know what? I’m going to try anyway…slowly.

So, in the next few weeks, you’ll see a lot of posts just presenting information on entreprise 2.0 best practices. If I’m lucky, I’ll find good case studies related to customer knowledge. And if I’m even more lucky, readers of this blog will contribute with relevant comments and examples. Let’s start with this rather high level presentation found that presents the wiki concept in business and provides a good list of risks and adoption success factors.

Why and How Competitive Intelligence Will Become more Strategic

If you’re not receiving your free monthly publication from the Society of Competitive Intelligence, go on their Web site and subscribe right away. There is always some useful information coming from them. For example, in the March/April Edition, they summarize a panel discussion on the future of competitive intelligence. Since I’m always surprised to fins that this role is too often neglected in companies, here are some of the highlights mentionned by the specialists :

Market conditions demanding more competitive intelligence :

• Increased costs mean companies need to keep a closer look on what their competitors are doing;
• Recession times force everybody to become more productive ans strategic;
• Emerging economies introduce new, low-cost entrants, competitors;
• New technologies and Web tools create opportunities to track competitor actions.

How will competitive intelligence evolve :

• Competitive intelligence will need to be both local and international;
• Its focus will habe to include market dynamics and trends as well as customer needs ans expectations;
• Competitive intelligence reporting needs to be more strategic to highlight the risks in a manner high management will quickly grasp … and more practical to stimulate action at the customer facing level;
• Competitive intelligence must play an integration role and connect the many parts of the organization linked to market forces;
• It can also be an important change agent in the organization, showing how things are done elsewhere;
• Competitive intelligence must be more proactive than reactive.

Succes factors :

• Introduce new techniques for information gathering, think outside the box and be open to creative strategies;
• Effective communication of the findings is key, present them in offensive/defensive perspectives or in a way your colleagues can translate in actions;
• High management absolutely must understand the strategic importance of competitive intelligence, invest in this function and pay serious attention to its findings;
• Train the competitive intelligence agents properly

Being in charge of competitive intelligenc ewhere I work, I’m obviously sold on the idea that the role must become more strategic. I can only agree that a paradigm shift is needed. But I must say we can start by closely looking at how we translate information in strategic customer knowledge. Let’s face it, our colleagues are swamped in information, they receive way too many emails. That’s why I’m always looking for new and improved ways of producing knowledge, which is different than information, and communicating in a user friendly fashion.