Generally speaking, there are three modes to make profit from WIKIs for financial institutions. They are explained as follows:
1.Internal Enterprise WIKIs (Reducing the cost of exchanging opinions inside the company)
WIKI model has been employed by a number of companies because of its efficiency and low cost. Companies build their Internal WIKIS to create a platform for employees to communicate with each other instead of arranging meetings. Here are some examples of internal WIKIs used by IT companies.
| Sony Ericsson | Sun Microsystems |
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| SAP | IBM |
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Take IBM as an analysis case. IBM DeveloperWorks WikisIBM DeveloperWorks Wikis cover topics like:
- Lotus Quickr Best Practices,
- J2EE Systems Management,
- WebSphere Instructor Wiki,
and a series of Web 2.0 Goes to Work conferences held in Raleigh, North Carolina and Austin, Texas. The space for those conferences has links to video posted on YouTube, a conference podcast, and a resources page for anything demoed at the conferences IBM WIKI HOME.[11]
With the IBM ID, you can probe into any field you want to get familiar with as well as write down your own opinion and share with your colleagues.
“effective wiki uses and the companies that benefit from them”, Jan 8, 2008
http://www.ikiw.org/2008/01/08/7-effective-wiki-uses-and-the-companies-that-benefit-from-them/
Financial institutions have already begun to use WIKIs in IT department. Later on, the application of WIKIs would spread to broader workplace environment, where they get collaborative projects up and running quickly by using WIKIs.
2. External Enterprise WIKIs (Advertisement)
External WIKIS provides the platform for the users to join the topics and to edit the articles by themselves. Usually, the website with External WIKIs makes profit from advertisement. The specific topics could appeal to the companies which are in the same business. Meanwhile, external wikis play an important role in Marketing as an efficient way to promote new products or collecting the feedbacks from their customers.
3. Customer oriented WIKIs
(Provide the special WIKIs for customers who want to promote their products)
Financial institutions could divide WIKIs into several specific categories according to the demand of clients. Clients can log in the category he is interested in and have the experience of communicating with financial experts by paying for a certain service fee.
Admittedly, WIKIs have some disadvantages which can bring to institutions extra costs. To avoid the backfire from WIKIs, we should pay attention to the constraints of applying it. There are cases where wikis work well:
Customers are:
*Extremely engaged with you and each other
*Work well together as a team
*Focus on specific topics
Enterprise WIKIs are:
*Emphasizing on the content
*Monitoring what is posted on
*External enterprise wikis confined with structured format
If a situation meets the criteria above, wikis can be fantastically applied in financial institutions.
