Case 2: Learning through knowledge creation and knowledge sharing
Dresdner Kleinwort (DKW[1]) is a Europe-based investment bank. Like many companies, DKW employees use wikis to share knowledge across the broader workplace environment to get collaborative projects up and running quickly. A problem companies like DKW face is how to encourage experts to contribute their knowledge to a knowledge ecosystem. Encouraging people to share their knowledge openly is important for collective learning. If knowledge is trapped in e-mails, or documents in private file systems, it’s not available for the collective. A study by Atlassian found that people who contribute their knowledge to a globally visible network became the recognised experts over time, because of their visibility and willingness to share.
How does collective learning take place – Employees in the company have to learn how to solve problems in their day-to-day work tasks. Sometimes they have to develop new knowledge to solve a problem. The knowledge exists within the company but it can be difficult to locate. Many companies now use wikis to allow people to share their knowledge and to draw from the knowledge of other people.
See also an account of implementing wikis in a smaller company http://www.e-gineer.com/v2/blog/2007/08/our-intranet-wiki-case-study-of-wiki.htm