Enterprise Wiki: An Emerging Technology to be Considered by the AEC Industry

Lately, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been receiving a large amount of coverage in the AEC industry media. BIM enables architects, designers, contractors, and representatives of other involved disciplines to work on a single shared model, thus enabling superior coordination of various design issues, which in turn leads to smoother project execution on the construction site. Compared to traditional inter disciplinary communication across multiple channels, the BIM approach highly improves efficiency for all the involved disciplines. However, the building information model by itself cannot contain—and thus cannot make more efficient—all the communication that takes place within and across design teams.

BIM versus Wiki: The Analogy

Despite the fact that AEC professionals have been increasingly using modern communication media such as email, fax, audio conferencing, web conferencing, and so on, the majority of them are not satisfied with their collaboration experience (see the AECbytes article, Reinventing Collaboration across Internal and External Project Teams). Collaboration problems include issues such as delays receiving input, difficulty in quickly retrieving relevant information, difficulty interpreting feedback, or coordination issues. This is where the wiki platform can help. The fundamental concept of wiki and BIM is surprisingly very similar—both enable multiple individuals to access and modify the data and information stored in a single central location (see Figures 1 and 2 showing the BIM and wiki concept respectively). Wiki, however, operates on a more general set of data when compared to BIM and can readily address most of the communication problems faced by AEC professionals.

The Basics of Enterprise Wiki

The term wiki applies to a website that can be edited by anybody who is granted permission. Enterprise wiki contains some additional features that make the wiki more suitable for use in a company environment. Wiki consists of individual pages that can include or contain links to external files such as PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, or images. Wiki can also embed standard communication media such as email and instant messaging. People who access the data and documents in a wiki are also authors of the wiki making it ideal for information sharing. Wiki content can be categorized, links among pages can be easily created, and all page revisions are archived—wikis thus excel as resources for archiving documents and tracking workflow. Compared to other content management systems, wiki lets users easily gather all the up-to-date information and correspondence pertinent to a project within one central location. Last but not least, wikis can be used to develop a shared corporate knowledgebase or "memory."

Currently, there are hundreds of wiki programs available—the site wikimatrix.org provides an excellent summary of the most popular engines and allows you to easily compare their features. Below are some wiki features that should be considered when making a decision about which particular wiki software should be used for establishing an enterprise wiki for an AEC firm.

• Commercial wiki versus. open source wiki: Open source wikis are usually free, but may require a certain level of IT experience to be properly installed and maintained (although commercial support for the most popular open source wiki engines is available today). Commercial wikis can be significantly more expensive, but will provide a professional level of support for the end user.
  
  
• Hosted wiki versus standalone wiki: Hosted wiki is a solution when the wiki software runs on the servers of the wiki provider. End users typically access the wiki over the internet using a secure connection. Standalone wiki can be installed either on the internet server or behind a company firewall and is a more viable solution for those who want to stay in complete control of their data.
  
  
• Wiki syntax: Wiki pages are typically written in a plain text containing simple markup language that determines how the text is formatted (e.g., ==Heading== will be formatted as the first level heading in a particular wiki). Many users may prefer WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) input, which is an optional feature for most wikis.
  
  
• Structured wikis: Structured wikis enable efficient handling of the combination of unstructured and structured data, thus combining the advantages of "regular wikis" and database applications. The structured data is typically described using the wiki markup language, which also provides means for data manipulation similar to the Structured Query Language (SQL) of relational databases. Joe Kraus, the CEO of Jotspot.com (Jotspot is a hosted structured wiki company that was acquired by Google in October 2006) even anticipates that structured wikis will enable widespread development of lightweight web based applications in the future. These highly tailored applications will enable the developers to focus on a much smaller group of end users than is the case for today's software.

How Wikis Can Help in the AEC Industry

Let's look at several areas where wikis are more efficient than the traditional and even some modern (non wiki) communication media:

• Wikis can be used to replace email for communication of in house non confidential information with long term information value.
  
  
• Use wiki to track, resolve and archive design issues. (When an employee leaves or retires from the company, the information is still available in the wiki, not lost in a private mailbox.)
  
  
• Use wiki to organize, index and archive completed projects for future reference.
  
  
• Use wiki to develop an in house knowledgebase about standardized design techniques and software.
  
  
• Project owners (such as Departments of Transportation, Departments of Design and Construction, etc.) could use public wiki with restricted editing permissions for outside users to better address questions from designers and community. The author has first hand experience with the inefficiencies of email communication used for the same matter.
  
  
• Wikis are known to significantly reduce meeting times or even eliminate meetings, because most of the issues are resolved directly in the wiki.

Tips for Deploying Enterprise Wiki

The single most important aspect of a successful wiki deployment is to understand the business process and craft a wiki solution for it. Every wiki starts as a blank page of paper; it does not have any content or structure. The initial wiki structure should be therefore carefully planned to reflect how the wiki will support the business process. As the amount of information stored in a wiki grows, the wiki has enough flexibility to "adjust its structure" to new demands. However, it requires discipline from all contributors, otherwise the wiki may just become a disorganized storage place of miscellaneous ideas.

Figure 3 shows a simple initial structure for a very basic design office wiki created using the dokuwiki engine. The index of pages in Figure 3 was automatically generated by the dokuwiki program, based on the names assigned to individual pages. This structure determined by the names of individual pages (e.g., page named knowledgebase:design_tips:bearings) will be assigned to the knowledgebase category (or namespace) and design tips subcategory. The knowledgebase category will store general information applicable to all projects, while the projects category will store information relevant to each project in its own subcategory.

The business size, its IT resource, and corporate culture can lead to several scenarios of optimal wiki deployment. These can range from installing free open source wiki by an internal enthusiastic group to hiring an external consultant to install, deploy, and maintain commercial wiki. When implemented wisely, wikis can amplify traditional business practices and introduce potentially revolutionary form of collaboration within and between teams.

A good starting point to learn about how wikis can dramatically improve collaboration is to visit the case studies or success stories pages on the websites of popular wiki engines. From these stories, one can learn that many major and successful companies and organizations such as Adobe, NASA, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, SONY, Philips, The Salvation Army, Nokia, Disney, Yahoo, Michelin, John Hopkins University, and many others, rely on wikis for their communication needs. Below are several quotations from the success stories that highlight some advantages of communicating "the wiki way":

• "We used to have over 100 group emails per day. Now it's rarely one per week, we've saved a month in a four-month software project, and everyone is on the same page." - Ziff Davis Media
  
  
• "The wiki has become a central repository for information that formerly was shared only in an ad hoc way through e-mail or face-to-face encounters. The wiki is making it possible to build an 'informal corporate memory'." - Zipp/Composite Tech
  
  
• "We've been running wiki for about two months now and cannot imagine ever having run without it. Gone are all the little bits of paper and notebook knowledge that 'someone' has. Everything is now on the wiki." - Appropriate Solutions

As described above, wikis have been successfully deployed in many industries and environments. While their deployment in the AEC industry is still rare, they have a lot of potential in tackling its communication problems. The AEC community should put some effort into exploring and realizing the full potential of this emerging technology.

About the Author

Ondrej Kalny is a structural and bridge design engineer with Hardesty and Hanover, LLP. He is also the founder and editor of BridgeArt.net, an online portal for civil engineers with a database of AEC software, AEC news monitoring service, and a structural wiki.

Note: The views expressed in Viewpoint articles are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect those of AECbytes.