Social software vendor Socialtext brought me in to work with Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW, now simply Dresdner Kleinwort) and help them understand how to use and spread adoption of their internal wiki. I worked two to three days a week on-site during the autumn and winter of 2005/06, meeting with staff, showing them the wiki and helping them understand how they could use it to greatest effect.

I was also commissioned by Socialtext to write a case study, which I present to you here, and which you can also download as a pdf.

Abstract
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) is an investment bank headquartered in London and Frankfurt. With 6,000 employees, it has offices in New York, Paris, Luxembourg, Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Eighteen months ago, in order to improve communications, collaboration and publication of key information, DrKW installed a Socialtext wiki.

“We already had a wiki that was heavily used by IT,” said Myrto Lazopoulou, Director of User Experience, “but we wanted to bring business people on board to enhance collaboration and communication between IT and the business. We wanted a platform for both groups, not something that’s used just by IT.”

Roll-out was staged, with Lazopoulou pre-populating the wiki with relevant content in order to engage with a wider audience. She took a low-key strategy to adoption, allowing usage to grow slowly and organically, through word of mouth.

As user numbers grew, Socialtext brought in social software consultant Suw Charman to manage support and adoption. She created a variety of materials to help users, including a cheatsheet, FAQ, best practice guidelines and screencasts. She also held face-to-face training for those who requested it.

Adoption was facilitated by the introduction of Socialtext’s WYSIWYG editor for the wiki, which saw wiki usage rise from 1,400 to 1,800 unique visitors by March 06. Dramatic improvements in page load times, achieved by moving the servers from New York to London, also encouraged employees to use the wiki.

One of the most enthusiastic user groups was Digital Markets, the business division responsible for developing, deploying and operating DrKW’s online products and services. Many of the wiki’s most vocal advocates worked within Digital Markets and it is one of the most vibrant sections of the wiki.

Popular uses of the wiki include:

1. Managing meetings. Many people use the wiki to compile agendas, update staff on recent events, and record and distribute meeting minutes. Using the wiki decreases the amount of email needed to collate items for the agenda, provides a forum for people to update each other prior to the meeting, and an allows for the easy dissemination of minutes afterwards.

2. Brainstorming and publishing. The wiki has also proved useful for collating ideas and developing documentation: users starting off with a page of random ideas that, over time, develops into a firm document. They are also using the wiki to publish information and documentation.

3. Creating presentations. Rapidly creating compelling presentations is difficult in PowerPoint, but the wiki made it easy by allowing users to focus on the content, not the look of the slides.

The wiki is now used by approximately 2,500 DrKW employees, and the numbers continue to grow. But challenges remain. Many employees still do not know what a wiki is, or do not feel that a wiki is useful.

However, long term evolution of the wiki will rely upon it being seen not as a specialist application, but as part of a suite of everyday communications tools. Socialtext’s tight integration with email helps in this regard, as does the wiki’s demonstrable value to the business.

Introduction
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) is the international investment banking arm of Dresdner Bank. Based in Europe, but with a global reach, DrKW provides a range of capital markets and advisory services, including: mergers and acquisitions assistance; listing companies that wish to go to market; providing structured finance for the funding of large scale projects; treasury and capital markets transactions; and risk management solutions. With approximately 6,000 employees, DrKW is headquartered in London and Frankfurt, and has offices in New York, Paris, Luxembourg, Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Given the number of employees at DrKW and their geographic distribution, teams had become used to working in ‘walled gardens’. Investment banks thrive on data, so it was very important that DrKW improve communications between the different locations and business groups.

“We already had a wiki that was heavily used by IT,” said Myrto Lazopoulou, Director of User Experience, “but we wanted to bring business people on board to enhance collaboration and communication between IT and the business. We wanted a platform for both groups, not something that’s used just by IT.”

The first wiki at DrKW was installed in 1997, at a time when the bank was using Documentum, Media Surface and Frontpage to create a static intranet. Having learned how useful wikis can be, DrKW wanted to expand their wiki usage and began examining Socialtext in March 2004. They tested it in July 2004 and then installed a Socialtext appliance in the third quarter of 2004.

The DrKW installation of Socialtext, internally branded as DrKWikipedia, sits alongside a traditional intranet; B2Evolution blogs; the Microsoft Sharepoint collaboration and communication service; and the MindAlign instant messenger client. The aim was to allow users to swap instantaneously between different modes of communication, depending on which is most appropriate.

According to JP Rangaswami, who was then Global CIO and is now Head of Alternative Market Models, Socialtext was chosen because “they were a company willing to work with us on the implications of better authentication, permissioning and sharing of information between communications silos. We needed to work with an organisation that understands where the future is heading, has the right attitude to building technology, and understood that the information needs to migrate across multiple communications mediums.

“Because we are regulated we need to make sure that everyting we do is recordable, archivable, searchable and retrievable. Given the market we operate in, we need to ensure that we prevent market abuse, avoid any risk of breaking down Chinese walls, correctly manage confidential information and yet still have better work flow.”

Roll-out and adoption
The Information Strategy team was the first group at DrKW to use Socialtext, on a hosted service. IT Security followed suit, with usage then expanding through non-IT sections of the business such as Digital Markets and Equity Derivatives.

In order to gain people’s attention, Lazopoulou pre-populated the IT wiki with content before before it went live to a broader audience in September 2005.

“There were lots of static pages on the intranet,” says Lazopoulou, “especially about IT training courses and books, that nobody could edit, so I started with those. I tried to find content that was interesting and that would motivate people to go and have a look at the wiki.”

The trick worked, peaking users’ curiosity.

“I remember I received an email from a developer whose friend wanted access because he had ‘discovered this fantastic resource’ for IT training courses,” says Lazopoulou. “You need to add interesting content to the wiki to engage people and show them how it is relevant to their team. Then they’ll start experimenting – editing and creating pages. If you give them a blank wiki it will never take off because they will never find the time to learn how to use it if they don’t see the value.”

DrKW took a low-key strategy to adoption, allowing usage to grow slowly and organically. They staged roll-out, introducing it first to IT via a department-wide email, then letting usage grow through word of mouth. A small number of evangelists promoted the wiki locally to their own staff, some mandating its use whilst others allowed people to engage in their own time.

Digital Markets
One of the most enthusiastic user groups was Digital Markets, the business division responsible for developing, deploying and operating DrKW’s online products and services. Digital Markets combines front office, support and IT specialists in one unit and so has a wide cross-section of users who must all be brought together on the same page.

Dipen Jobanputra, Digital Markets Sales, feels that the most important benefit is that everyone can exchange ideas and have a voice.

“The wiki allows me to think of ideas,” Jobanputra says, “and to get involved in things that aren’t necessarily my area, but where I can add value. There have been times where senior business people have come back to me and said, ‘You know, I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s a really good idea’. And vice versa: I’ve put something out there and someone’s come up with a very simple solution, but they could be working in Tokyo or New York and there’s no way I would have talked to them before. I think that’s brilliant.”

He continues, “having a town hall meeting with 400 staff is very daunting if you have to put your hand up and ask a question that could be awkward. I’m happy to do it, but many other staff are not, and wikis and blogs allows these people to put their views across. It’s great for business or IT people to have an idea in isolation, but this software allows us to bring business, IT and other areas of the bank together and to get them all talking.”

Jobanputra also thinks that the way in which social software can strengthen interpersonal relationships is a valuable win. He says, “I can give a real life example of this. For about six months, I talked to the head of our business unit, Sean Park, via the wiki, blogs or instant messages – I’d never met him in person. Sean’s quite a powerful bloke, although a very nice guy, and it’s quite daunting to have to go and get a senior MD to sign off on something when you only have two minutes to pitch. So when I did finally get to meet him, it was a friendly meeting. Now that’s partly down to him being a friendly person, but I felt a lot more comfortable walking in and asking for a lot of money based on a piece of paper, and getting him to sign off on it very quickly, because we’d already built up a rapport.”

Stuart Berwick, Director of Digital Markets Sales, believes that the value lies in ease of use and “the ubiquity of the Web. The Web is the easiest place for anyone to get information, so if you want to give someone access to information, the easiest thing is to do is send them a link. It’s more user friendly than an attachment, it’s live and it’s up to date. The fact that a wiki is a web page that’s easy to edit, that’s fundamentally all it is. There’s a lot of wiki philosophy which is interesting, but at the end of the day it’s just a website you can change.”

Providing support
As user numbers grew, it became clear that additional support would be needed, so Socialtext brought in social software consultant Suw Charman to manage support and adoption. Charman provided short, informal training sessions to introduce new users to the wiki, explain best practice and teach wiki mark-up. These voluntary sessions lasted less than an hour and showed users how to navigate the wiki, create and edit pages, upload files, and change settings. Group sizes varied from three to 10, and location depended on what was convenient for attendees – some sessions were run in meeting rooms at two of DrKW’s London offices, others were held at the user’s desk or in the user’s office.

Charman created a variety of materials to help users, including:

• A single-page ‘cheat sheet’ which users could print and refer to as they familiarised themselves with the new software.
• A FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page which addressed DrKW-specific queries not covered in standard help materials.
• Best practice guidelines, covering page and category naming conventions.
• Four screencasts (screen captured videos with commentary), based on the face-to-face training sessions, which covered navigation, creating pages, editing page, and changing settings.

Support was not limited to providing reference materials. Realtime help requests were serviced by:

• Live chat rooms: A discussion channel where users could talk about Socialtext, suggest improvements and new functionality; and a support channel where users could ask for help on specific matters.
• A centralised email address which fed requests for help through to all staff involved in supporting the wiki.

During the latter months of 2005, the chat channels and training sessions were very busy. Users frequently asked for help with tasks such as formatting text or creating links. With the advent of the WYSIWYG editor, the number of help requests decreased dramatically.

“We used to get a lot of requests for help via Grapevine or email,” Lazopoulou explains, “but now I get just one a week. It’s not just the WYSIWYG editor that’s helped – the screencasts make a huge difference. The Frankfurt staff can now get training remotely that’s good enough to get them started.

“Whenever I get a request for help, the first thing I do is send them links to the screencasts and the Grapevine channel, so they can ask questions in Grapevine and someone from the community will help. If they still have a problem they can contact me. The Socialtext wiki needs virtually no support now. All you need to do is devote five minutes to playing with it, and having a look at the links, and that’s it.”

Introducing the WYSIWYG editor
By December 2005 over 1,100 people were using Socialtext, but the biggest barrier to adoption was the need to learn ‘wiki mark-up’ – the special punctuation needed to indicate formating within a wiki page. For example, a word encased by asterisks would be displayed as bold, and underscores create italics:

*bold* becomes bold
_italics_ becomes italics

The majority of the early adopters were in IT and so had already used Twiki, the first DrKW internal wiki, or MediaWiki, the software that underpins Wikipedia. To them, using wiki mark-up did not present a significant challenge. However, to users not familiar with the concept it constituted a significant barrier to entry.

In January 2006, Socialtext released a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, which provides an editing interface that behaves in a similar fashion to word processors such as Word. By eliminating the need to learn wiki mark-up, Socialtext made the wiki much easier to use and effectively removed many people’s reservations – a change reflected by the jump in usage observed within DrKW. By the end of January 2006, an additional 300 people were accessing the wiki, bringing the total number of users to over 1,400, a figure which rose to over 1,800 by the end of February. Over the two months following the introduction of the WYSIWYG editor, wiki usage rose by 30%.

Dipen Jobanputra believes that the WYSIWYG editor was pivotal to the success of the wiki.

“I think it’s going to be plain sailing now that we have the WYSIWYG editor,” said Jobanputra, “because there are no excuses any more. People don’t need to turn around and say ‘Where do I put this line? How do I bold that?’ Everything is incredibly easy. People are used to collaborating on Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and the WYSIWYG editor creates a comfort zone which makes people more inclined to use the wiki. And for me, I can now tell people that they have to use the wiki and I know that I’m not going to get any negative feedback.”

Nigel Verdon, Digital Markets’ Business Development Manager, agrees. “The WYSIWYG editor makes the wiki more accessible so people are prepared to try it. My personal assistant has been trained and she’s now started to help out with meeting agendas, so having the WYSIWYG editor is great for the basic stuff she’s doing, because it removes the fear factor.”

Operations and IT
Niall Hammond, Head of London Banking Systems, was introduced to the wiki when a colleague sent him a link to a comparison of Socialtext and Sharepoint. As someone with a lot of Sharepoint sites, Hammond was interested to see what the wiki had to offer. He took part in one of the early training sessions, and spent time assessing how the wiki could be used within Operations/IT.

“I looked at two potential uses for both the IT and Operations teams: collecting resources within the team, and for outward publicity, such as who to contact and formal publication of their information. I worked on the IT side, and Benedict McGuigan independently started using the wiki at the same time in Operations.”

Both Hammond and McGuigan found it beneficial for their teams to use the wiki, and encouraged others to do so. They replaced old intranet pages – some of which were three years out of date – with new, up-to-date wiki pages.

“The wiki is used heavily,” said Hammond, “and it’s become the primary tool for intra-team communications and for informing the business of what we’re doing.”

But it wasn’t all plain sailing. To start with, Hammond would add information to wiki pages, such as an issues list, and then ask people to go to the page to update the list, but their first instinct was to email back information rather than edit the pages themselves.

Myrto Lazopoulou recognises this behaviour.

“At first, people feared that they were going to expose themselves by posting,” she says, “even if it’s just test pages. But now more and more people are onboard, and are adding more content, creating test pages, and experimenting. It’s an question of confidence.”

Hammond has spread wiki usage through his team by demonstrating how easy it is to use, and the benefits that accrue.

“If people are told what to do,” he says, “they rarely pay attention. I lead by example, and show people the savings we’ve achieved by publishing support and issues information. I used to waste a lot of time emailing meeting minutes to people, or answering enquiries about meeting agendas, location or dial-in numbers. But that hasn’t happened now for four or five months.

“We have a product called Quartz, and it went from being a product under development to one that was released and being promoted, so we had to provide a new set of information. It progressed from being relevant to just a few people, the developers, to being introduced to the business, IT, and support teams in London and Frankfurt. Until the wiki came along, there was no way to distribute that new information without an intranet site or Sharepoint, so we used it as an experiment to see how the wiki might work. And it let us publish higher quality information more rapidly than an intranet site or Sharepoint site.”

Server enhancements
When the Socialtext wiki was first introduced it was installed on servers in New York, despite the majority of users being based in London and Frankfurt. As wiki usage rose, European users began to experience delays in page loading as data travelled across the Atlantic to the New York-based servers. The time taken for a page to load was 340 milliseconds, which was enough to make users feel frustrated with the wiki. Heavy concurrent usage of a single page made the situation worse.

The solution was to create a more elaborate architecture, with a server in New York and another in London. The new London server was launched in mid-March 2006, with all European traffic automatically routed to the European installation. This dramatically improved page load speeds, bringing them down to 80 milliseconds.

At around this time, Socialtext also launched a European server for their hosted wikis, improving performance and speed for users of Socialtext.net. On the Socialtext blog, CEO Ross Mayfield said:

“This weekend Socialtext launched a Europe Proxy Server to provide a five-fold performance increase for Socialtext Personal […] and Professional users. While many of our European customers, including Nokia and DrKW, have opted for Enterprise deployment behind the firewall, Europe has caught the wiki (and blog!) bug, and performance is a key usability factor.

“Socialtext’s hosting network enables users to collaborate across the pond in the same wiki with similar performance. Users in Europe are directed through eu.socialtext.net, a London-based server, to access the same wikis the rest of the world does through www.socialtext.net.”

For DrKW, this meant that any hosted wikis used to communicate with clients across the firewall would benefit from the same speed gains made by moving their internal wiki application across the Atlantic.

Use Case One: Managing meetings
Dipen Jobanputra started using the wiki because he was told to, and to begin with he wasn’t very impressed: “I was quite hostile, with a small h,” he says. But his attitude changed as he saw how useful the wiki could be.

“I run a weekly meeting to discuss our clients. We used to keep the agenda first on paper, then by email. Then I put it on to an Excel spreadsheet to give it a bit more substance, for example, listing the clients, what the issues are, who the sales sponsor is, what work needs to be done. It was just a natural evolution to move it from an Excel spreadsheet, which potentially ten people had ten copies of, to a single page on the wiki.”

With teams across two buildings, using the wiki to write agendas in real time was just ‘common sense’.

“I think the toughest thing for me was delegating responsibility for maintenance all of that data to the relevant teams. But now nothing gets lost in translation and we’re not waiting on anyone to update their data – if it’s not done you give the appropriate team a kick and it gets done. Everyone can see what is going on regardless of location, and this forms the basis of our weekly teleconference.”

The teleconference used to be one and a half hours long, with much time wasted on bringing people up to speed on the week’s events. Now team members update themselves on the wiki, and that part of the teleconference takes five to ten minutes.

“The rest of the teleconference is used for ideas generation, being innovative, talking about problems and looking at solutions, which is what the meeting should be about. It shouldn’t be about updating people as to what’s happened, but thinking about our clients and how we can service them.”

This has had a dramatic effect on the way Jobanputra views the wiki. “I’m no longer hostile with a small h,” he says, “I’m friendly with a small f.”

Nigel Verdon also uses the wiki to run meetings: “Writing agendas, collecting materials for meetings, it’s all a chore when you’re doing it over email. Prior to the wiki, we used to use PowerPoint presentations, which were a pain to put together because everybody had to email me their agenda items, and if I wasn’t around they couldn’t add it themselves.”

Verdon now uses the wiki to keep an archive of all old agendas, and create new ones. He finds the easiest way to do this is using Socialtext’s ‘duplicate page’ functionality, creating a copy of the last agenda and editing it, rather than writing it all up from scratch every time. He then uses the ’email page’ functionality to draw people’s attention to the new agenda and ask for their input. This, Verdon says, makes his life easier and makes the process of creating an agenda “quicker and more effective”.

Use Case Two: Brainstorming and publishing
Verdon also finds the wiki useful for brainstorming and collating ideas, using it as a “random scratch pad for putting stuff down”. He now intends to use the wiki to develop new brochures for Digital Markets products.

“The original brochure was more like a catalogue of products, so for the new ones we’ll put the content on the wiki, develop the ideas, pull it all together, edit it and publish the final version, so that the marketing guys take that and get it into print. Beforehand it would have been emails going round, with different versions cluttering up your inbox. For developing ideas, the wiki is much more effective.”

As well as getting things into print, Verdon and his team are also using the wiki to publish and distribute all the relevant information about their products and department.

“One of the big issues in banks that I’ve seen over the past 15 years,” says Verdon, “is that lots of people have things squirreled away on their own home drives, so it doesn’t get backed up. But you have to publish your information and I’ve found that the wiki has been a very useful tool for that. It allows you to focus on the content, rather than all the technicalities of a heavyweight document management system like Documentum. Plus we get all the benefits of change control, audit, etc. Within Digital Markets, we publish everything that we work on so people can contribute, can change it, and can give their feedback in the comments.”

For example, Verdon publishes all his cost centre information so that when he’s asked to provide a cost centre code, he can direct people to the wiki. “Again, that makes my job easier. The wiki really does help you publish, collaborate, and communicate, which banks have traditionally been pretty poor at.”

Publishing all your data also reduces operational risk when staff leave, he says. “If somebody leaves and they’ve got everything on their home drive and nobody knows where anything is, that’s a problem. With the wiki it’s published, it’s available, it’s searchable, and the person that takes over can carry on from where their predecessor left off, so there’s a lot less operational risk for the business.”

Use Case Three: Creating presentations collaboratively
The Digital Markets team also found the wiki very useful for putting together presentations, as Stuart Berwick explains.

“My boss Sean had to give a senior management presentation in New York, and needed to put together very quickly a set of slides collating information from the management team, covering status and plans for 2006. Previously that would have been a huge email exercise, with number of meetings to co-ordinate it and lots of drafts, in PowerPoint.

“Instead one person co-ordinated it, setting up an agenda page and individual pages for each of the main slides so that everyone – asychronously, in their own time and in parallel – could write the presentation. Within about three of four hours, a presentation evolved that would have taken days and been a much more frustrating process had it been through email and PowerPoint attachments.”

Nigel Verdon elaborates, “We designed the structure of the presentation on the wiki and decided how the various slides we were going to put together should actually work. Then we started brainstorming ideas, adding information and linking to other bits of content that were to be referenced in the presentation.

“We went through several iterations of editing and, when the content was finished, we took it and put it into PowerPoint. One of my pet hates is creating presentations in PowerPoint, because it makes you think in PowerPoint, as opposed to thinking about your content and how you’re going to communicate with people.

“The wiki allowed us to pull all the various pieces that we needed to work on together without distributing it via email to everybody and then losing change control over it: who’s merging what into where, or who’s got the latest version. It’s a much more effective way of working.”

Expanding Usage
While the wiki is now being used by approximately 2,500 DrKW employees, it’s essential that it continues to grow. Myrto Lazopoulou is tracking weekly usage, and is seeing a steady increase not just in page views, but also the number of people editing: About one in ten visitors to the wiki now makes an edit.

“A year and a half after we first started this project, the numbers are still growing,” says Lazopoulou. “And I am confident that they will continue to grow.”

Dipen Jobanputra believes that growth is not just desirable, but necessary: “If we are going to succeed in our business, wiki usage has to expand. All of my team-mates are actively using the wiki to publish data on a daily basis. My team manager is probably one of the biggest users of the wiki – it just makes sense.

“In the future, I can see us negotiating complex contracts via a wiki; I can see a special firewalled area for DrKW and the client where we can discuss documentation. Or if I want to know who I’m going to call at one of our vendor firms it would be very useful for me to give them a wiki and for them to update their own information. And visa versa: If my client wants me to update my personal and contact data, then I’m happy to do that.

“It has to grow, and people have to take it seriously from a business perspective. I work in a business environment and I am involved with talking to clients, selling products, getting clients on board with us, and promoting Dresdner. From an external perspective you have to show one face, have one message, and the social software that we have internally allows us to do that.”

Current and future challenges
As with the installation of any piece of software, it is not all plain sailing and some challenges remain. In a recent series of interviews with 30 DrKW staff, those who had become familiar with the wiki have very positive things to say about it, but many still did not know what a wiki was, or did not feel a wiki was suitable for useful.

Jobanputra again: “I have come across some inertia, but people are now beginning to realise that it’s important and when you try it, it becomes part of your daily routine. When I come in in the morning, I check what’s on the blogs, I check what’s on the wiki, just like I check what’s on email. Years ago, people didn’t check their email because they didn’t have email; they weren’t looking at text messages because they didn’t have mobile phones. But this is just an natural evolution and it’s something that we have to do.”

The long-term evolution of the wiki will rely upon more people viewing it not as some specialist application used by IT, but as a fundamental part of their suite of everyday communications tools. Socialtext’s tight integration with email – users can create and edit pages by emailing a special wiki email address, and can distribute wiki pages by email – will help in this regard but there remain cultural issues that are not so easily surmounted.

“The benefit of the wiki,” says Nigel Verdon, “is to be able to say to the company, ‘This is what we are thinking at this moment time. It will change and when it changes you will be told about it.’ But that only works when everybody is socially aware and supports an open environment. I think wikis would fail in organisations where people are frightened to talk and publish, and there are fear culture organisations like that. It works in DrKW, especially in Digital Markets where most people are happy to say ‘Look here it is’, to be transparent, and to be a fool in public. That stimulates good debate and allows us to generate some great ideas.”

Demonstrable value
It can be difficult to communicate to the skeptical why wikis work so well in enterprise precisely because, as demonstrated at DrKW, they are so flexible and they do not focus on solving one specific business issue. Thus the return on investment for wikis can be hard to define, and even harder to measure. The yardsticks that work for one business may not be relevant in another, yet it should be clear to all business leaders that better communications, improved efficiency and a more connected, innovative workforce are highly desirable outcomes.

At DrKW, wiki users have seen demonstrable value. Their meetings run more smoothly and are more productive; unnecessary barriers between teams are being broken down; the quality of product specifications and documentation is improving; presentations are being written faster and more effectively; and the risks posed by staff leaving is reduced.

But more than that, the wiki is helping people form business relationships with people that they would otherwise never have met. It’s strengthening existing relationships, and providing a forum for high quality conversation and exchange of ideas.

“We had to move away from a static, dead intranet,” says Myrto Lazopoulou. “The wiki has allowed us to improve collaboration, communication and publication. We can cross time zones, improve the way teams works, reduce email and increase transparency.”

Those who have been converted to the ‘wiki way’ at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein have been convinced by the wiki’s utility, ease of use, and business benefits – they have not been converted by theory or rhetoric. It is through day-to-day experience, through seeing how other people use the wiki and then adopting the ideas that solve your own problems, and through sharing knowledge and connecting with colleagues in different locations and teams that the wiki’s evangelists have discovered and encourage wiki use.

Investment banking is a highly regulated and conservative industry, yet DrKW have built an open, collaborative, live intranet that is robust, up-to-date, and continuing to expand.