Sr. Application Engineer in a Telecom Services Company - Followup Interview

Date of Interview

• April 6, 2006

Purpose of Interview

• To follow up an interview conducted earlier.
• Find out about the respondent's experience with using wiki technology in a corporate setting.

Interview Notes

• Respondent had installed open source MediaWiki software on an existing internal server. Installation was simple and straightforward, according to the system administrator. Out of pocket expenses were minimal.
  
• Installation was designed primarily for use by an internal group of engineers involved in application design, service, and support for a complex software product. Primary areas covered by the wiki are technical and deal with configuration and management of a complex software application.
• Respondent had hoped that more people would "take ownership" of different parts of the wiki and begin adding and updating. This is not exactly what happened:
• Only a small core group (3-4 people) became active in adding content although a larger number of people were inclined to add comments.
  
• A wider group (10-12) became regular users of the content as a reference tool including engineers "outside the firewall" who were able to access the wiki via VPN.
• Respondent became aware that the user ad become accustomed to using the wiki regularly when the servergroup was taken offline and complaints immediately came in.
• Respondent described how some users became regular users of certain parts of the wiki and began to attach their own comments to those sections. Interviewer commented how this resembled behavior of professional call center reps who build their own "libraries" of frequently accessed information. Respondent agreed this was an apt analogy.
• Respondent commented that this wiki was not really a "live web" application with an integrated underlying database. Automatic maintenance and updating of links and complex graphic or tabular objects is not supported. It is a text oriented product with its own formatting standards and, while this differs from various online tolls such as Writely may be appropriate in certain situations.
• We discussed the issue of editorial control. respondent noted that most people did not want to exercise editorial control or ownership, that they were more likely to add comments than add or modify major sections.
  
• Respondent says that the goal of generating a product that can be handed over to customers so they can support their own products has not yet been met. This wiki as it has evolved is rather being viewed -- and used -- as a technical  internal reference tool.
• Respondent described how one executive had proposed purchasing licenses for an expensive financial management application in order to gain access to a module that supported inventory management in a way that could help coordinate oversight of the company's compliance with U.S. Federal Government restrictions over the export of sensitive technologies. The executive was shown that the wiki with incorporation of a simple spreadsheet could be used to support similary inventory management controls at a much lower costs.
• Respondent does not like the wiki's page formatting and prefers more standard tools such as word processors and tools such as Writely and Writeboard.
  
• Respondent was asked if the company would support the remote storage of sensitive company data in a web accessible system such as a wiki. He said no but did feel that a small or mid-size company, say, with 200 staff members. might reasonably onsider relying on extrenally stored data that was web accessible given availability of appropriate security protocols (i.e. SSH, SSL HTTPS support, etc.)