Abstract:China National Post Advertising Corporation (CNPA) is the nation’s leader in the print advertising business. In CNPA, many employees need to work collaboratively with people who are not physically co-located. Even if they are in the same location, they need a collaboration space to help some interdependent and uncertain tasks get done faster and more effectively. Currently, e-mail is the major online collaboration tool for them. However, it obviously is not the best choice for a collaboration-intensive company like CNPA. Managers of CNPA are challenged for a long time to find more effective and efficient collaboration tools. Based on the company’s objectives and challenges, current IT infrastructure, users’ requirements, and geographical make-up, we suggest two excellent Web-based tools which are designed to facilitate collaboration: 1) NetMeeting; and 2) wiki. After investigating these two collaboration tools’ pros and cons, we recommend wiki to CNPA. We provide a deep analysis of this technology, including tech description, a brief overview of why it is the best fit for the company, costs and barriers, and evaluation method of the implementation.
1. Situational Analysis
• Historical background
China National Post Advertising Corporation (CNPA), a Beijing-based company, is the nation's leader in the print advertising business. Since it was founded in 1997 as a subsidiary of the State Post Bureau of Chnia, CNPA has been meeting the challenges of helping advertisers in many fields to successfully reach their target audiences by combining innovation, high-quality products and strategic growth. The company is developing very fast and it currently operates over 200 post advertising companies in 30 provinces across the country.
In CNPA, many employees need to work collaboratively with people who are not physically co-located. Even if they are in the same location, they need a collaboration space to help some interdependent and uncertain tasks get done faster and more effectively.
• Tech snapshot
CNPA has begun to use some traditional communication technologies such as telephone and fax machines since its foundation in 1997. In 2000, in response to a perceived need for an information infrastructure that could reduce communications costs as well as promote external and internal information exchanges, the company constructed its intranet and the high-speed Internet access. However, the company has not made the most use of these information technologies. Employees mainly use the network to browse information, upload and download files, share documents, and disseminate organizational information, and e-mail comes to be one of the major communication channels and collaboration tools. Though e-mail is useful for many reasons, it does not ensure much collaboration. For CNPA, a collaboration-intensive company, e-mail obviously is not the best choice for online collaboration. It has been a challenge for ages for managers of CNPA to find more effective and efficient collaboration tools.
• Where’s the organization going
CNPA’s business strategy is to consolidate its premier position in each of the markets it serves. Currently, the company is facing a number of challenges in the increasingly competitive marketplace. One of their fundamental challenges is to seek out a way that allow employees to collaborate in a more effective, productive and creative manner. “Our new business imperative is to develop a team-based work system and network the right talent together,” says Mr. Li, general manager of CNPA, “Our purpose is to share all the information, knowledge, and work in a more transparent, reliable and cost efficient way, so that we do not need to fly out our staff from headquarters frequently” (personal communication, November 28, 2005). Just as Fichter (2005a) stated, “The new mantra for organizations is collaboration”. Improved collaboration therefore can be regarded as an important means of accomplishing CNPA’s business strategy. This is where a communications technology implementation can play an important role.
2. Approach and methodology
• Rationale for a technology implementation
As we have identified earlier, managers of CNPA are seeking more effective and efficient ways that foster collaboration among employees. A technology implementation will help them out. The reasons are as follows:
First, since many employees in CNPA are choking on the limited usages of its network resources, considering implementing an Internet-based communications technology that may enhance its current communication system should be definitely in the minds of managers.
Second, given the collaboration-intensive working environment of CNPA, the company obviously needs a technology implementation to help its employees capture the collaborative potential of team-based work.
Third, employees of CNPA handle interdependent and uncertain tasks nearly everyday. It has been stated that as tasks become more interdependent and uncertain, the need for flexible coordination mechanisms emerged, and communication technologies are an important tool for developing such coordination (Thompson, 1967). Thus, introducing a communication technology that better fit the company’s working practice and requirements is a natural step to improve its overall work performance.
• Tech options
The good news is that the past decade has ushered many low-cost, easy-to-install/use online collaboration applications. Here, based on CNPA’s objectives and challenges, current IT infrastructure, users’ requirements, and geographical make-up, we suggest two excellent Web-based tools which are designed to facilitate collaboration: 1) NetMeeting, “a popular tool for real-time videoconferencing and working together across the Internet” (Krause,2004) ; and 2) wiki, “a relatively simple tool that allows any member of a group to create or edit any piece of Web-based content, any page, any image at any time” (Salz, 2005). Each of them has its own strengths and weaknesses as follows (See Table 1).(The table can not be displayed normally here)
NetMeeting
Pros
-Cost effectiveness: It slashes travel costs; It can be downloaded for free from Microsoft’s website at www.microsoft.com/netmeeting/
-Real-time: It enables users to conduct real-time interactive presentations and meetings
-Rich-media: It uses video images as well as sound to duplicate as closely as possible the experience of face-to-face meetings
-Powerful functionality: Other than video and audio conferencing, it supports various features, such as interactive whiteboard, application sharing and file transfer (Day, 1997)
-Easy to use
Cons
-During the video or audio conference, participants may experience delays because streaming audio and video takes up a huge amount of network bandwidth
-Data conferences can include up to 32 sites. The number of participants is limited by the bandwidth and the processor speed
-The software can transmit videos and audios of only two users at a time
-Its interface is too busy
Wiki
Pros
-Cost effectiveness: It reduces the burden of travel; Free wikis can be found at many websites such as www.seedwiki.com and www.twiki.org
-Asynchronous: Users don’t have to all log on at the same time
-Attractive, user-friendly interface
-Powerful functionality: Good for creating, editing and sharing all types of data that can be displayed in a web browser
-Simple installation, use and management
Cons
-Although most wikis do include a comments area, they are not the best tools for carrying on conversations, airing opinions or exchanging views
-Its open-editing capability “raises concerns about misuse, abuse, and reliability of the information” (Fichter, 2005a)
To sum up, NetMeeting is designed to handling synchronous conversation. That is not wiki’s forte. Instead, wiki is excellent at asynchronous collaboration. Both of them have the ability to foster communication within and between teams and enable teams to collaborate online, regardless of how far the members are separated by time and distance. With either NetMeeting or wiki, the company would be ready to help out the teams that want an online collaborative space.
3. Recommendation
After investigating pros and cons of NetMeeting and wiki as well as considering the company’s comprehensive conditions, we recommend wiki to managers of CNPA.
• Tech description
Named after wiki-wiki, the Hawaiian term for quick, wikis are sites created with a Web application that anyone or at least anyone with permission can collaboratively create and edit online documents (Fichter, 2005b; Goodnoe, 2005). The first wiki application was written by Ward Cunningham in 1995. Now there are dozens of sites which offer free or commercial wiki software, including Wikipedia [www.wikipedia.org], WikiQuote [www.wikiquote.org], WikiTravel [www.wikitravel.org], seedwiki [www.seedwiki.com], TWiki [www.twiki.org], and IAWiki [www.iawiki.net]. Companies that specialize in wiki technology such as Socialtext and Jotspot are “focusing on how corporations can use wikis to enhance the collaborative process” (Oser, 2005).
Wiki is starting to gain recognition as one of the most powerful online collaboration technologies. A major benefit of wikis is their open-editing capability which allows anyone to edit anything. “The wiki revives the idea of the writable Web, where every reader is a writer, which was how the Internet was conceived in the first place. Wikis are really transformative in how they allow users to collaborate on projects”, observes Ross Mayfield, CEO and co-founder of Socialtext (Salz, 2005). With a wiki, users can share all types of data that can be displayed in a web browser, such as Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint documents and even video and audio programs. Some wikis also have the feature of page attachments, which is useful for uploading or downloading files in the Wiki. Furthermore, wikis can embed various standard communication tools such as E-mail and Instant Messaging, and heavy-duty PHP-based wikis can directly interface with company databases to bring in audio and picture files (Goodnoe, 2005). “The functionality of a wiki is limited only by the programming skills of the person who implements and maintains it” (Goodnoe, 2005). In addition, it can be set up behind the company’s firewall to provide better security. In short, it helps the company establish a collaborative space easily and cheaply without sacrificing functionality or security.
Most wiki applications are user-friendly. They hide the complexity and make content creation and editing extremely simple and convenient. With wiki software, users merely need to access an open site or log in to a password-protected site, click the link of “Edit This Page” or “Edit Text”, and then start typing to add, delete, or edit content. Some wiki programs even have built-in edit toolbars with standard buttons familiar to Microsoft Word users, such as bold, italics, hyperlinks, image links, and headings (Fichter, 2005a).
Although wikis was developed ten years ago, it is only recently that wikis are starting to take off in business. According to Goodnoe (2005), “Wikis have found their greatest initial success in a few specific areas of the business landscape that require heavy doses of content management, such as project management and spec control. He found that it was mostly small businesses (those with less than $25 million in revenue) that are experimenting with wiki technology. However, he also indicated that several large companies had deployed wikis as well. Take the examples given in Goodnoe’s study, “Nokia Corp. has been using Socialtext wiki software for a year and a half to facilitate information exchange within its Insight & Foresight group. Yahoo Inc. uses TWiki software to help its development team overcome the problems associated with working from a variety of separate locations”.
With the potential to encourage the creative friction that can often lead to good ideas, wiki is gaining attention in the field of advertising too. Some advertising companies have begun to use this technology to publish advertisements, improve communications, and encourage flexible collaborations. For instance, the interactive advertising agency R/GA started a wiki in 2004 and has collected a multi-layered body of knowledge. To quote John MayoSmith, VP-technology of R/GA, “The best thing about it is for the first time disparate bits of information are linked together in one place and dated. Before the wiki, information about a project or issue would be siloed in e-mails, voicemails, directories and remote databases, and content and corporate intelligence that directly relates to clients was hard to access” (Oser, 2005).
• Summary of fit
Why the particular tech, wiki, is the best fit for CNPA? Several key reasons are outlined as follows:
First, unlike many communication technologies, wiki is easy to implement and “remains simple enough for nontechnical employees to use” (Goodnoe, 2005). It is a very simple, intuitive, flexible, and nontechnical way to facilitate collaboration or sharing. Thus, wiki is very suitable for employees of CNPA such that they can dedicate themselves to produce creative and eye-catching advertisements rather than spend a lot of time in studying how to use this technology.
Second, wiki is compatible well with the company’s existing network infrastructure and thus provides it with a great chance to improve its current communication system. As we have known, the only online collaboration tool deployed in CNPA is e-mail, via which people send attachments back and forth and often create multiple versions of the same document. As a result, nobody is quite sure who has the latest version or what changes were made. With a wiki, such issue can be easily addressed. By posting documents on a wiki, the latest version is always available and all changes can be easily traced to their source. In addition, the number of large attachments people have in their e-mail boxes can be greatly reduced.
Third, “One of the challenges for those using and managing communications technologies in organizations is to select the hardware and software that will provide the appropriate level of coordination for key organizational tasks” (Wolfe, 2005). As mentioned earlier, the interdependent and uncertain tasks carried out in CNPA demand a high level of collaboration. Managers of CNPA are challenged to foster the collaboration among employees. As the ultimate collaborative tool, wiki is a highly effective means of handling this task. A wiki’s power comes from that fact that it is built for teams and by teams. It provides the company with a collaborative place where shared documents can be viewed and revised by a team. Any one in the team can be a writer or editor, thus taking collaboration to a whole new level. In the time-strapped work environment of CNPA, wiki will have the potential to help teams to work together more productively. By placing information at employees’ fingertips, it lets employees create and manage a range of business documents with a minimum of effort and risk of redundancy.
In a word, as the cream of the current crop of the Web-based collaboration tools, wiki is a potentially killer app for CNPA.
• Costs and barriers
We have discussed the rewards of wiki in detail above. Since there are many free wikis, financial issue of deploying a wiki is not a big concern. However, there is no doubt that some other costs have to be taken into account:
a) Despite the fact that the software comes with installation wizards, additional time and efforts still required to download, install and configure the new software;
b) Although most of wikis are easy to learn and use, navigating and using them can still present a bit of challenges to the first-time users. Since the idea of open editing is relatively new for CNPA’s employees, it will probably take a while for them to get comfortable with the new technology. Part of this problem can be solved by training and guidance;
c) Like a garden, wikis need constant care and pruning because its organic nature, which allows anyone to add anything, can lead to a chaotic information space (Fichter, 2005a). The company should assign the role of wiki gardener to one or more people to regularly clean up the wiki, add new links, connect revised and new content, and help preserve the continuity over time. Also, different norms of behaviors need to be developed in order to keep the wiki consistent and work well;
d) Fichter (2005a) claimed that “wikis work best in organizational cultures in which there is a high level of trust and control can be delegated to the users of the system”. Thus, cultural hurdles of hierarchy, control, and a sense of lack of accountability, if exist, need to be overcome so that the wiki can reach its best performance (Bean & Hott, 2005);
e) Probably the biggest issue system administrators need to address is how to deal with firewalls on intranet. This will require planning, trial and error sessions.
• Evaluation
It has been shown that “information technology is adapted and readapted when situated in organizational practice” (Henfridsson, 2000). Therefore, before giving the new technology a real try, it is too early to say whether it really makes sense for the organization. It is important for the company take time to test the waters on the implementation after deploying the software for about one month. The best way to evaluate the implementation is to use focus groups, a technique that can help the organization assess user needs and feelings either before interface design or after implementation (Nielsen, 1997). A focus groups session usually lasts about two hours - in this time, the moderator interviews 6-10 representative users. “The initial focus group should have at least six users because you need a flowing discussion and various perspectives. Typically, you should run more than one focus group, because the outcome of any single session may not be representative and discussions can get sidetracked” (Nielsen, 1997). Focus groups might generate a great deal of useful information about the implementation, so the company can see how wiki fits with the needs of the organization.
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