Enabling Customer-Centricity Using Wikis and the Wiki Way (PDF ...

ENABLING CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY USING WIKIS AND THE WIKI WAY

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Enabling Customer-Centricity Using Wikis and the Wiki Way CHRISTIAN WAGNER AND ANN MAJCHRZAK CHRISTIAN WAGNER is a Professor of Information Systems and Associate Dean at the City University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Business. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of information systems to support decision making and problem solving. Dr. Wagner has written over 30 refereed articles in journals such as Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Decision Support Systems, Communications of the ACM, and International Journal of Human–Computer Studies. He has received research funding from organizations including the National Science Foundation, Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council, and the German Academic Exchange Service. Wagner’s most recent research focuses on the development and evaluation of conversational knowledge management systems, especially wikis and weblogs. Wagner is the principal investigator on a Society of Information Management (SIM) Advanced Practices Council project on the corporate use of wikis, whose results are described, in part, in this paper. Previously, he cofounded and served as board member and chief technology officer of a venture capital–funded software startup firm. ANN MAJCHRZAK is a Professor of Information and Operations Management at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. She is a specialist in the design and management of technology change. Her focus is on the development of change plans that optimize the synergy between computer-based technology, human capabilities, organizational structure, and strategic needs. She has conducted research on this synergy as well as developed tools to help technology and organizational designers, which have been used in Europe, Australia, and South and North America, with companies such as Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, Texas Instruments, Hughes, and Digital Equipment Corporation. Dr. Majchrzak has written seven books, including The Human Side of Factory Automation, Human Aspects of Computer-Aided Design, and A Reference Book for Performing a HITOP Analysis. She has written 16 book chapters in well-recognized reference books such as The Handbook of Industrial Engineering and The Handbook of Human Factors. She has also written over 30 refereed research articles in scholarly journals such as MIS Quarterly, Management Science, IEEE Transactions in Engineering Management, Journal of Occupational Psychology, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and Journal of Manufacturing Systems, and has two publications in the Harvard Business Review. She has been the principal or coinvestigator for over $3.8 million in research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, Russell Sage Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Office of Technology Assessment, and private industry. She won the SIM International Award for best paper. In addition, she won Best Paper for 2001 from the Academy of Management.

Journal of Management Information Systems / Winter 2006–7, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 17–43. © 2007 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 0742–1222 / 2007 $9.50 + 0.00. DOI 10.2753/MIS0742-1222230302

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WAGNER AND MAJCHRZAK

ABSTRACT: Customer-centric business makes the needs and resources of individual customers the starting point for planning new products and services or improving existing ones. While customer-centricity has received recent attention in the marketing literature, technologies to enable customer-centricity have been largely ignored in research and theory development. In this paper, we describe one enabling technology—wikis. Wiki is a Web-based collaboration technology designed to allow anyone to update any information posted to a wiki-based Web site. As such, wikis can be used to enable customers to not only access but also change the organization’s Web presence, creating previously unheard of opportunities for joint content development and “peer production” of Web content. At the same time, such openness may make the organization vulnerable to Web site defacing, destruction of intellectual property, and general chaos. In this zone of tension—between opportunity and possible failure—an increasing number of organizations are experimenting with the use of wikis and the wiki way to engage customers. Three cases of organizations using wikis to foster customer-centricity are described, with each case representing an ever-increasing level of customer engagement. 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. Parallels between our findings and those evolving in studies of the open source software movement are drawn. KEY WORDS AND PHRASES: customer-centricity, knowledge creation, knowledge management, open source, wiki.

COMPANIES ARE STRUGGLING WITH CHANGES in customer behavior [25]. Instead of seeking information from corporate sources, the product producers or service providers, customers increasingly turn to other customers or customer-centric, third-party Web sites, such as Epinions, eLance, or Citysearch [12]. In an attempt not to have their marketing functions disintermediated, some organizations have begun to embrace the new Web media and to create an open dialog with customers. Others have attempted to engage customers even more thoroughly in a joint informational production process [34], from product development to after-sales (help desk) service. 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 technology as an up-and-coming technology to engage customers [2, 15, 22, 36]. The assumption is that those organizations that can truly capture the technology’s potential


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will experience dramatic improvements in the degree to which customers are engaged with the organization. Despite this increasing awareness of wikis within the popular press, there has been no research attention given to how wikis are used to enable customer engagement. As with any technology adoption, organizational changes are undoubtedly required (cf. [10]). The unique characteristics of wiki technology are likely to require more structural changes to the organization than other technologies—in large part because wikis can blur the boundary between an organization and its customers (cf. [16]). Consequently, changes may be needed both in the organization serving the customers and in the network of participants who coalesce in the wiki space. In this paper, we examine three case studies of organizations at early stages of using wikis to enhance customer engagement, resulting in a model of successful characteristics to focus future research.

Customer-Centricity in the Internet Era Customer-Centricity Defined IN RECENT YEARS, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT) has brought considerable customer relationship capability to organizations by capturing and managing customer profiles seamlessly across various touch points. This capability, however, is used to keep the organization “in the center” of the relationship, allowing only “quasi-customized” relationships with each of its customers [33, 34]. Truly individualized, customer-centric relationships have been almost impossible for organizations to maintain because of the vast number of customers with which the organization must interact (cf. [7]). Organizations therefore often respond by predefining touch points and ignoring inputs from customers that are outside of those touch points. For example, during the product development process, lead customers may be invited to join focus group meetings, but many others may be ignored. Empowered by the Internet and their ability to share knowledge and information with others, customers may thus turn to other channels to share their knowledge and feedback about an organization’s products or services. Online user groups discuss issues ranging from corporate strategy to new product development and after-sales service, such as a customer’s newsgroup posting about the faulty Intel Pentium floating point unit [9]. Increasingly organizations find themselves in the position of having to respond to such customer comments (e.g., [20]). Customers are even redefining the meaning of brands as they share their knowledge about product usage, thus reducing the effectiveness of traditional positioning strategies [13]. In this new world of customers sharing their knowledge and reactions openly with others, the notion of customer-centric business is becoming redefined. Customercentricity accepts, as a starting point, the assumption that customers have specific needs and wants that only they can articulate. This articulation occurs not just in communications with representatives of the organization but also in discussions with other customers. These needs are articulated not simply through discussions, but

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through a cocreation process. Thus, knowledge creation with customers becomes the focus of the customer-centric processes [34]. Customer engagement and cocreation hence become metrics for the success of customer-centric processes. Customer engagement becomes defined as the intensity of customer participation with both representatives of the organization and with other customers in a collaborative knowledge exchange process.

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. CRM systems are unprecedented in their ability to capture operational customer information and enable companies to manage and use that information across a range of customer touch points. Yet they capture the information predominantly in ways defined by the organization (and the CRM system’s data structures), rather than by the customer. Consequently, customer insights and information sharing are rarely captured in CRM systems [6]. Technologies to support customer-centricity that complement CRM functionalities and enable customers to cocreate have recently gained popularity. These technologies, when sponsored by the organization, enable customers to quickly, easily, and securely share their ideas with other members of the community, giving customers a relatively free and flexible medium for sharing, while allowing some control and management of the interaction by the sponsoring organization. The three technologies receiving the most recent attention as a medium for such customer engagement are discussion forums, weblogs, and wikis [2]. Common among these technologies is that they are “lightweight” [7] because they do not require the extensive technology and support infrastructure that other applications such as enterprise software demand. Consequently, implementation is often observed by user departments at the “grassroots” level. The language of interaction is simple, necessitating little or no “programming” (due to the use of simple codes or a word processor–like editor, instead of HTML). New content is visible immediately after its posting. Despite the similarities, there are differences between the three technologies. Weblogs promote a model of first-person storytelling and commenting, whereas forums engage customers in a process of question-and-answer (discussion). In both weblogs and forums, the content is organized chronologically rather than by topic. The wiki way, on the other hand, is intended as a medium for collaborative, topical writing and editing. Customers or organizational representatives can post an idea whereupon others, without special authorization, can modify the text to reflect their own thinking. Over time, with multiple edits, the resulting idea may be of higher quality because it has been exposed to reactions of both customers and organization insiders. At the most essential level, wiki design and use are founded on a set of 11 principles [24] that jointly define a vision, process, and structure for free and open idea exchange (see the Appendix). These principles, when followed, are intended to lead to


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open and incremental contributions, as well as serendipitous knowledge exchange. For example, one user may ask a question and in so doing create a hyperlink to an as yet undefined term while another user—unaware of the question—may inadvertently answer the question by independently defining the term. As such, wikis enable idea exchange in surprising and collaboration-promoting ways, described by some as the “wiki magic.”1 Furthermore, unlike forums or weblogs, where new content is appended to the old, wikis let new information update and overwrite the old while preserving previous versions in a temporal database, together with a record of the change history. In a wiki context, then, customer engagement may be encouraged by customers and organizational representatives contributing knowledge to the wiki, both by posting linked wiki pages and by coediting wiki pages created by others. While wikis may foster customer engagement, they may also create new problems for the organization. The open engagement of customers in a coediting process makes the organization vulnerable to Web site defacing, destruction of intellectual property, and general chaos. Ideally then, customer-centricity involves not simply higher levels of customer engagement, but higher levels of “constructive” customer engagement. Therefore, our research question is: How do organizations use wiki technology and the wiki way to facilitate higher levels of constructive customer engagement? Our intent was to develop a theoretical model describing factors leading to constructive customer engagement when using wikis.

Existing Literature on Possible Factors Facilitating Customer Participation SCHOLARLY RESEARCH ON WIKI USE IS IN ITS INFANCY [41]. Nevertheless, wikis are an outgrowth of an open source community, with the tenets of the “wiki way” following the tenets of open source projects [24]. Although wikis are used for many other tasks than software projects [27], the 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. From that literature, five factors have been identified as important for facilitating participation in open source communities (cf. [4, 28, 31, 39]): • Value proposition. Open source software projects usually build upon an initial core artifact whose value is recognized by potential contributors (such as the original 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.

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• Processes for cocreation. In open source projects, communities rely on distributed, parallel development, low-participation overhead, and version management. • 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.

Research Design YIN [42] SUGGESTS THAT CASE STUDY RESEARCH DESIGNS are most likely to be appropriate for “how” and “why” questions. Consequently, because our research question focused on how organizations use wiki technology, we adopted a case study research methodology. Moreover, we believed that a case study approach was appropriate because we were interested in studying how customers were engaged in the wiki technology in a natural setting to ensure that the success characteristics we identified would be generalizable to actual customer engagement processes. While we used the five factors as guideposts in our case study approach, the dearth of existing research theory on the topic led us to adopt an exploratory case study strategy [3]. That is, instead of examining specific propositions for each of the five factors in the case research, we reasoned that a more open-ended approach to our research was required. As such, we approached the case study looking for specific ways in which wikis were used, rather than specific theories for explaining how wikis might be used. We employed a multiple-case research design to identify patterns across cases. Moreover, we carefully selected the cases to represent a range along our dependent variable of customer engagement. In this way, characteristics favorable for customer engagement should be more present in the more successful cases and less evident in the less successful cases. Thus, the multiple cases serve as “replication” logic for our results [42]. To ensure construct validity, we used multiple sources of evidence in our cases. We interviewed as key informants those who either started the organization’s wiki or continued to monitor the wiki’s use. Key informants in all cases included the creators or cocreators of the wiki site. We also obtained statistics about each wiki site. In addition, we examined the wiki sites for access, comments, changes, and other contributions. Finally, for each case, we consulted blogs or Web sites describing opinions about each of the organizations’ wikis. Using these multiple sources of evidence, we were able to develop case studies describing how wikis were used to engage customers. Finally, to ensure internal validity, we followed a process in which we first developed a description of each case that focused on ensuring that the facts of the case were appropriately depicted. The description was reviewed and approved by the wiki champion for the site. Then, for each case, we examined the description for a list of


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characteristics associated with wiki use that were present in the case. We did this for all three cases. We then looked for similarities and differences between the three cases, clarifying terms and constructs. The final set of enabling characteristics confirmed that the most successful case had more success characteristics than the less successful cases. A similar approach to multiple-case research has been used in Majchrzak et al. [26]. The three cases of wiki use we developed were the “Boomtown Times” (a pseudonym) wiki editorial experiment, Novell’s Cool Solutions wiki, and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia (see Table 1 for an overview of cases). While all three cases represent some level of customer engagement, they vary in the degree of success. The Boomtown Times wiki editorial experiment was the first attempt by a large, mainstream media organization to engage customers in jointly preparing an editorial. The experiment proved that customers were interested in participating in such a venture; however, the experiment was discontinued after repeated site defacings. Novell’s Cool Solutions wiki has not experienced any vandalism since its inception in March 2005. It has achieved a reasonably wide participation rate; however, to date, much of the participation has been limited to FAQs, rather than cocreation. Finally, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia has achieved a wide readership, wide authorship, and significant cocreation, sufficient to alter the business model under which encyclopedias operate today.

Boomtown Times Customer-Written Wikitorial In June of 2005, Rich, an editorial manager, and Martin, an IT staff person at the Boomtown Times, decided to start an experiment in customer-centric news reporting. The wiki editorial experiment was launched for the purpose of allowing customers— readership of the Boomtown Times—to cocreate well-argued and well-informed opinion pieces. The premise we had is that . . . there is an aggregate greater value to have many people look at a problem. We had been interested in trying new experiments in the world of opinion because we think opinion is going online and how it would relate to what newspapers already do. (Rich) As a newspaper, we wanted to be able to engage readers in as many ways as possible. This was another way to do that. Instead of a letter to the editor that is fixed by the editor, this [format] eliminates the middleman. (Martin) The wiki-based editorial was set up on a single wiki page. The page was seeded with an editorial on Iraq, a topic chosen because of the wealth of information available about it and the level of likely interest among the readership. Announcements in the Boomtown Times then invited visitors to participate in rewriting the editorial. The process of becoming a contributor was uncomplicated and fast. In general, registrations on wiki sites can be handled in one of three ways—no registration at all; a simple, automatic registration with instant approval where any unique name and

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Table 1. Case Overview (May 2006) Boomtown Times

Novell Cool Solutions

Wikipedia

Application model

Editorial

Online “magazine”

Encyclopedia

Purpose

Rewrite editorial to incorporate multiple perspectives and rich information

Create articles to answer technical questions of interest to a specialized user group

Create articles on a broad set of human knowledge

Size

< 10 content pages

1,300+ pages

900,000+ pages

Registered users