Essentials of Business Communication 8th Edition by Mary Ellen Guffey

Exercise 30

FormaI Report: All About Wikis
As discussed in this chapter on p. 262, wikis are becoming increasingly important to businesses that rely on teamwork across time zones and national borders. Some educators also use wikis for collaboration in their college-level classes. You are part of a group of interns from your college working at a large financial institution, Home Bank. Your intern team has collaborated on your finance-related research using a wiki. Your informal wiki has also been helpful when you worked together on a team project for college credit. Your internship supervisor is impressed and would like you to collect more hard data so he can pilot wikis for wider application in collaborative settings at the bank, Your preliminary research suggests that quite a few companies are using wikis, such as Best Buy's Geek Squad, Xerox, and IBM.
In fact, IBM conducted a massive online brainstorming session that took two 72-hour sessions and involved 100,000 employees, customers, and business partners in over 160 countries.18 Your boss is interested in reading about such cases to decide whether to pilot a wiki, and if so, what kind would work for Home Bank, Your team of three to five will investigate.
Your Task. Keep in mind that your boss, Irving E. Pound, will share your report with other managers who may be computer-literate users but no tech heads. Start with the brief definition of wikis earlier in this chapter. Expand the definition by searching the Web and electronic database articles. First explain what wikis are and how they work, which resources (cost, software, hardware) are needed, how much training is required, and so forth. Examine the use of wikis ¡n business today. How are large and small companies benefiting from collaboration facilitated by wikis? If your instructor directs, the report (or a section thereof) could discuss wikis in education and how instructors harness this new tool. After collecting a sufficient amount of information arid data, outline and then write a formal report with a recommendation at the end suggesting whether and how Home Bank would benefit from investing in wiki software.