Measuring the Success of a Wiki for Small Organizations

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1,3, Dresden Technical University, language: English, abstract: The impact of knowledge management systems (KMS) on organizations grows rapidly. Increasingly, corporations are also using wikis to support employee collaboration and knowledge management (cf. Wagner, 2004, p. 104). A 2008 study by Gartner indicates that this year half of all US companies will use wikis (Morse, 2008). Wikis allow open collaboration in organizations and offer great potential for teamwork and knowledge management (KM). Using this potential for organizations in research context is a difficult task, because user groups are smaller and many tools already exist. It is therefore crucial to understand what makes a wiki successful. This seminar paper investigates the success factors of wikis derived from practical surveys, classifies them for relevance to small organizations and finally builds a wiki success model based on IS research and the practical success factors found.