Power In Numbers; How wiki software is reforming bloated bureaucracies and changing the face of communication.

Byline: Jessica Bennett

The United Nations, notorious for endless deliberations, is trying a technological quick fix. Its Global Compact Office, which promotes corporate responsibility, has embraced a once fringe social technology--the wiki--in hopes that it will help staff in 80 countries share information and reach consensus with less deliberation and more speed.

The office has done this by enlisting the public in its review of progress reports from more than 2,000 companies--an effort to make sure each is complying with established social and environmental guidelines. It's debatable whether encouraging public input is a good way to increase efficiency, but the move is the latest example of a quickly growing trend. Wiki software--easy-to-use programs that let anyone with Internet access create, remove and edit content on a Web page--first gained popularity thanks to Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia that has come to be hailed as one of the Web's greatest resources. Now the technology is increasingly spreading outside the world of tech geeks and into the mainstream, being adopted by workplaces, corporations and even governments. In what's been dubbed the "wiki workplace," a growing number of organizations have begun shifting from traditional hierarchical structures to self-organized and collaborative networks, using wiki software--a basket of technologies that include wikis, blogs and other tools--to foster innovation across organizational and geographic boundaries. Executives say the new tools make it easier for teams to collaborate and share information, and to get projects up and running on the fly. "Collaborative software has become a very important part of how businesses will invent and innovate," says Ken Bisconti, IBM's vice president of messaging and collaboration software.

That the United Nations is embracing wikis is an indication that organizations are beginning to get over their fear that this technology could introduce chaos into their operations. As Wikipedia has demonstrated, Web sites that are open to the public are vulnerable to vandalism, bias, inconsistency and other problems. But most corporate wikis are closed to the public, limiting access to employees inside the company firewall. These quasi-closed systems, say technology mavens, impose accountability simply by keeping a record of every change and who made it.

IBM has used internal wikis since 2005, with an eye to selling the concept to its clients. One of its first applications was a wiki that employees could use to collaborate on writing a blogging manifesto: a set of policies for appropriate use of blogs in and out of the office. Thousands of employees contributed and edited that manifesto, which after receiving corporate approval--became the company's official policy.

Today, workers throughout the global company are connected by an internal portal called WikiCentral, which more than 100,000 employees use for updating product documentation and modifying company policies, and for maintaining their own corporate profiles--a sort of business MySpace. And for the past couple of years, IBM has incorporated the wiki and other collaborative software into its corporate products like Lotus Notes, a desktop software for accessing e-mail and other ...