April 7, 2006

For the past two to three years now, millions of Internet users have used the familiar and user-friendly Wikipedia, an great online encyclopedia that lets anybody create, modify or even manage content in just about any topic you can think of.

Now, Wikipedia has competition! There are literally thousands of similar projects, powered by the same MediaWiki open source software.

The time has come for B2B companies to think more seriously about what they could get out of this open project approach to content creation and management.

In an effort to understand the many reasons why, it's best to begin with why Wikipedia is so powerful in the first place.

Consider this quote from a Wikipedia article on The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a book by Eric Raymond:

"The essay's central thesis is Raymond's proposition that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (which he terms Linus's law): if the source code is available for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, then bugs will be discovered at a rapid rate. In contrast, Raymond claims that an inordinate amount of time and energy must be spent hunting for bugs in the Cathedral model, since the working version of the code is available only to a few developers."

Raymond has always emphasized that the power of Linux is that it could be overhauled, even from scratch, in a matter of days given the large base of developers.

This idea applies to the knowledge base of any enterprise. The current model is the stovepiping of knowledge, with separate departments and organizations responsible for their own areas of expertise. What happens in a Wikipedia environment is that all knowledge is one searchable repository. All page changes are precisely tracked (so that, in case of vandalism, easy reversions can be made) and changes attributed to individual authors.

What emerges out of this is a community of content creators who, in correcting, disputing, and adding to each other's work, build a better knowledge base.

Think about a product. Your company's engineers will have a spec-based insight into it. Customer service reps on the frontlines will know what customers are actually saying about the product. User groups will know about how the product performs in real situations.

Manufacturing planners may know how its cost structure is determined. Marketing has come up with catchy ways of describing the product. The CFO knows how the product family contributes to the bottom line, and where it falls in the spectrum of profitability.

A product, then, is like a Wikipedia article, in which people with many different kinds of knowledge come together to create a single reference point.

Once you cease to "own" information in the enterprise context -- once you break down the walls between fiefdoms and get everyone literally on the same page -- you can create an accurate, encyclopedic knowledge base on just about anything, including products, strategies, and operations.

Of course, the natural tension is between the very character of an enterprise -- which is hierarchical and controled -- and the nature of information, which flows freely. Knowledge respects no boundaries and enterprises are boundaries.

That's fine, as long as these boundaries are based in reality. But what if they're not? Right now, most American automotive companies are under the impression that selling SUVs to a tiny demographic in an era of $70-per-barrel oil makes sense.

Failing companies are basically cults, willing to follow their convictions all the way to the grave. But go over to the GM blog and you'll see the wisdom of crowds and open content in action. GM's customers are in a war with GM itself, with the customers based in reality and GM based in fantasy.

Imagine, for a moment, if GM were an open enterprise capable of responding to actual consumer demand rather than the fantasies of eccentric managers. That kind of GM could only exist if its cultural DNA were open. Alas, like most cults, GM is closed. You are only allowed in if you drink the Kool-Aid.

One of the greatest virtues of Wikipedia is that it is anti-Kool Aid. If you have an axe to grind, other people will call you on it.

If you have a particular bias you are trying to promote in a certain article, people will call you on it and indeed battle you over it.

These kinds of battles may be unpleasant, particularly to a "true believer" who doesn't want to see his or her point of view challenged (just as people at GM don't want to hear that paying $140 to fill up the gas tanks of their SUVs may not be a tenable long-term practice), but in the end reality prevails.

Not because a single point of view emerges, but because every user and reader is aware of the existence of many points of view sturggling for expression. It's a kind of creative and mind-expanding tension that does force you, however frustratingly, to question and refine your own understanding.

GM is a particularly striking example of the allied hubris and stupidity that doom every cult to oblivion, but surely every enterprise struggles with the same issues in a diluted form.

There are pockets of unreality in every enterprise, and Wikipedia is the ultimate corrective, a way to bring together currently isolated knowledge and to let content succeed on its own merits.

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