1 / 31

Enabling Customer-Centricity Using Wikis and the Wiki Way

CIS 601 - SPRING 2009- CSU-OHIO MS-CIS PROGRAM DR. TIMOTHY ARNDT - PROFESSOR. Enabling Customer-Centricity Using Wikis and the Wiki Way. CHRISTIAN WAGNER AND ANN MAJCHRZAK PRESENTED BY: KAISER MOHAMMED. Introduction and Definitions.

irma
Download Presentation

Enabling Customer-Centricity Using Wikis and the Wiki Way

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. CIS 601 - SPRING 2009- CSU-OHIO MS-CIS PROGRAM DR. TIMOTHY ARNDT - PROFESSOR Enabling Customer-Centricity Using Wikis and the Wiki Way CHRISTIAN WAGNER AND ANN MAJCHRZAK PRESENTED BY: KAISER MOHAMMED

  2. Introduction and Definitions • Customer-centric business makes the needs and resources of individual customers the starting point for planning new products or improving existing ones. • With the advent of the Internet one such technology that enables this is wiki technology- a web based collaboration technology designed to allow anyone to update any information posted on a wiki based Web site.

  3. Wiki Technology Discussion forums or blogs, for instance, have become a medium for organizations to facilitate a customer-centric, joint-production process with their “customer communities.”This approach encourages discussion, but frequently limits customers to comment on an organization’s published information content, without being able to change it. In contrast, wiki technology [24, 41] is a platform where anyone—inside or outside the organization—can write or edit other authors’ writings, thus giving customers the opportunity to publicly edit an organization’s public Web presence. Gartner, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek have recently identified wiki technologyas an up-and-coming technology to engage customers [2, 15, 22, 36].

  4. Pros and Cons • Provides unheard of opportunities for both organization and the customer to benefit from joint content development. • At the same time, such openness may make the organization vulnerable to Web Site defacing, destruction of intellectual property and general chaos.

  5. This Paper • Studies three cases of organizations using Wikis to foster Customer-centricity • 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.

  6. Customer Centricity in the Internet Era • In recent years IT has brought considerable customer relationship capability to organizations. • Truly individualized, customer-centric relationships have been almost impossible for organizations to maintain because of vast numbers of customers with whom the organizations may interact.

  7. Customer-Centricity in the Internet Era • The Internet has enabled democratization of the customer involvement process. • knowledge creation with customers becomes the focus of the customer-centric processes

  8. Technologies to Support Customer-Centricity • Customer relationship management (CRM) systems, while satisfying a considerable need to better understand the customer, fall short of enabling this more acute form of customer-centricity. • they capture the information predominantly in ways defined by the organization

  9. Technologies to Support Customer-Centricity • The three technologies receiving the most recent attention as a medium for such customer engagement are discussion forums, weblogs, and wikis. • Similarities and differences exist between these technologies. • Why wiki is unique and has been singled out. Saw some of this already.

  10. Key research question • How do organizations use wiki technology and the wiki way to facilitate higher levels of constructive customer engagement? • similarities of the tenets between the wiki way and open source communities suggest that the scholarly literature on open source communities might provide some guidance in understanding how higher levels of constructive customer engagement might be facilitated with wikis.

  11. Five Factors for facilitating participation inopen source communities • Value Proposition • Collective Wisdom/Community Expertise • Governance of the community • Processes for co-creation • Technology

  12. • Value proposition. Open source software projects usually build upon an initial core artifact whose value is recognized by potential contributors (such as theoriginal Linux kernel). • Community expertise (“collective wisdom”). In open source software projects,skill is a significant determinant of an individual’s role in the community, with core team roles usually being attainable only by those possessing significant systems development expertise. • Governance of the community. Existence of a lightweight structure, but with operational, collective choice, is important in open source projects. • Processes for cocreation. In open source projects, communities rely on distributed,parallel development, low-participation overhead, and version management.

  13. • Technology. The ability to rapidly create, share, test, and revise open source outputs is facilitated by the use of collaborative technologies for knowledge sharing. In fact, many open source projects use wikis as the collaborative tool for their collaborative efforts. Therefore, having a simple, easy-to-use technology is an important enabler of the engagement process. Given these five factors, then, we undertook a set of qualitative case studies to explore the role of these factors in encouraging customer engagement when using wikis.

  14. Three Case Studies • In order to understand what may contribute to a web site’s success, this paper studied three implementations of wiki technology for Customer – centric purposes. These are as follows:- • Boomtown Times • Novell Cool-Solutions • Wikipedia An overview of these studies is given in the table that follows:-

  15. Key issues that emerged during each case study • In the case of BoomTown Times the main issue was the lack of ability to keep a civil and synchronized discussion ongoing among participants owing mainly to lack of control over the posting of individual participants for the duration that the page was hosted. Since this was meant to be just an experiment it did not matter other than that it seemed to provide how to implement this in a better manner in the future.

  16. Key issues … continued • One user spilt the page in an effort to organize content into those who were in favor of one view over the other. • It invited inflammatory content and unconstructive contribution like obscene imagery. • It drew traffic from Slashdot.com an alternative media commentary site and this may have led to further destabilization of the site.

  17. Key issues … Novell CoolSolutions • Novell had at one time numerous products (over a 100) that were implemented at various sites like schools and colleges. These were not owned by multiple groups in Novell and therefore the need arose to have a place where an organization implementing multiple Novell products could go to in order to configure and trouble shoot the plethora of products. It grew popular very quickly.

  18. Key issues … Novell Cool-Solutions • Among some issues that emerged were the repetition of questions. Due to chronological nature of postings similar questions got buried in the mass of material and could not be retrieved with ease. • It provided a forum for those wishing to exhibit their technological prowess in their area of work.

  19. Key issues… Novell Cool-Solutions • Some negative commentary appeared but Novell decided to leave them so that the effort is deemed a genuine one at providing customers an absolutely true picture of the real world status of the products. • All in all it was a positive experience and some customers based on their contributions became advisory board members. They felt recognized.

  20. Key Issues … Wikipedia • Started in 2001 • Emerged from an unsuccessful attempt to start an encyclopedia written and rigorously edited by “experts”. This attempt called “Nupedia” yielded only 20 articles in 18 months. • This led the founders to the web in search of voluntary contributions in order to “feed” Nupedia. In 6 months they had 6000 articles.

  21. Key issues … Wikipedia • This further led to an abandonment of the high effort editorial process with that being left now to the everyday contributors themselves. • The wikipedia process has now further evolved. They had established rules and regulations and processes that ensure minimal or no vandalism, fair treatment to conflicting opinions on issues and content of high quality.

  22. Key issues … Wikipedia continued • It seems to have combined the best principles of democracy as well as scholarship by use of technology thereby providing the best possible word on an issue of interest and one that may in the future be commented upon or edited by almost anyone with an interest or some knowledge of what is going on.

  23. Interpretations and conclusions • Found obvious similarities with factors that affect participation in open source literature viz. value, processes, governance, expertise, technology. > Example > use of technology • Differences > Example > less emphasis on individual expertise for Customer-Centricity. Instead, our cases illustrated the reliance on communal wisdom. That is, one does not have to be an expert to contribute, only has to have a willingness to share an idea that others can build on.

  24. Interpretation • the enabling characteristics we found in the cases were those that cut across multiple open source factors in new ways to fit the special opportunities provided by wiki-supported customer engagement • These are listed as below:-

  25. Interpretation: Enabling Factors • Proposition 1: Allowing customers to exert more custodianship over the wiki site leads to greater constructive customer engagement. • Proposition 2: Increased alignment among wiki site participants leads to greater constructive customer engagement. • Proposition 3: Explicit processes for contributing to the wiki site leads to greater constructive customer engagement.

  26. Interpretation: Enabling Factors • Proposition 4: Allowing multiple layers of participation to emerge and be maintained leads to greater constructive customer engagement. • Proposition 5: Management and monitoring of system activity by the community leads to greater constructive customer engagement. • Proposition 6: Using increasing levels of technology that help monitor and manage how customers collaborate promotes greater constructive customer engagement.

  27. Limitations and Conclusions • Perhaps the most important limitation of our design is that alternative interpretations of the case studies cannot be ruled out [14, 23]. For example, factors other than wiki use could determine successful customer engagement, such as market conditions, nature of the discussion, nature of the organization hosting the system, or project management principles. None of these were explicitly studied.

  28. Limitations – Excerpt- illustrating deeper issues involved • “Our research has focused exclusively on customer engagement. The presumption is that greater levels of customer engagement will lead to greater innovation. This is a presumption that very much needs testing. Is it possible that the differences we saw between our six characteristics enabling successful customer engagement and the five open source factors is due to the innovation expected and required in the open source community? Does the reliance on collective wisdom in the wiki context (versus reliance on individual expertise in the open source context) lead to less innovation from wiki participants than open source participants? Not necessarily. The wiki notion that no artifact (e.g., an article) is ever finished and thus can always be augmented may lead to greater innovation than would be observed from the formal release-based structure of open source.”

  29. Conclusion • “OUR MULTIPLE-CASE STUDY LEADS US TO SUGGEST that wikis and the wiki way can enable the creation of successful customer-centric Web sites, as long as certain enabling characteristics are in place” • Wikipedia has already altered the business model under which encyclopedias operate today. • As such, wikis present a new model for customer participation in the evolving value creation process that was once proprietary to the firm and offer a variety of new research opportunities to explore knowledge sharing and innovation.

  30. Example Wiki Web Pages • http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/ • http://wiki.novell.com/index.php/Cool_Solutions_Wiki_Main_Page • This page was last modified 11:54, 14 January 2009. • This page has been accessed 305,188 times. • http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

More Related