Group+Paper


 * COLLABORATIVE COMPUTER-SUPPORTED TECHNOLOGIES AND GROUP SUPPORT SYSTEMS:**
 * DRESDNER KLEINWORT WASSERSTEIN USES WIKI FOR COLLABORATION**

In business, many decision strategies and much of the creative process are the result of groupwork. Groupwork allows an organization to maximize the talents and efforts of all team members. A steady rise in corporate globalization-- as team members are located in multiple locations, in different time zones, and sometimes different languages-- a collaboration communication tool that improves communication and work methodologies among its members are competitive advantage of global company to sustain its business. In addition, organizations have found that group collaboration can also lower costs, increase productivity among its employees, and form creative thoughts to be more innovative. Nowadays, complex decisions are often created through groupwork. On this paper, our group analyzes collaborative computer-supported technologies and group support systems, specifically Dresdner Keinwort Wassertein's (DrKW's) old and new collaboration tools. In addition, we also analyze Wiki collaboration tool in detail since it is DrKW's solution of its limitations of the old collaboration tool.
 * INTRODUCTION**

There are many real-time collaboration tools that help organizations deal with time and space issues on projects, such as Electronic, Video and Web Teleconferencing, Interactive Whiteboards, Screen Sharing, and Instant Video. Electronic teleconferencing facilitates live synchronized communication between two or more people that are in different locations while Video teleconferencing has many additional applications in addition to the electronic teleconferencing. For example, it transmits business meetings and teaching classes since it can be saved as an electronic record of events. Nowadays, it has also been used to interview job applicants. A cheaper Video teleconferencing is a Web conferencing because it is transmitted over the internet and can be viewed by thousands of people at one time. An interactive whiteboard is a groupware tool that allows multiple groups to access identical information that is posted instantaneously. Screen sharing is a software application that permits group members to work on a common project at the same time with the ability to change the project. In addition, it allows other members of the group can see these changes on their computer screens right away. Instant video is like a live chat room with picture and sound via IM software similar to Skype telephony a popular peer-to-peer communications service. As technology evolves, new collaborative tools have become available, such as VOIP, Collaborative Work flow, Web 2.0, **Wikis,** Collaboration Hubs, Collaborative Networks, Corporate (Enterprise) Portals.
 * REAL-TIME COLLABORATION TOOLS**

A Wiki is a piece of server software available at a Web site that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content through a Web browser (Efraim, 2010). The first wiki was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham was called WikiWikiWeb and installed in on the internet domain c2.com. He chose the term wiki after the Wiki-Wiki bus system in Honolulu, Hawaii as an alternative to "quick". The term "Wiki" means "quick" or "to hasten" in Hawaiian.
 * WIKI COLLABORATION TOOL**

Wikis are a powerful tool to help facilitate groupwork and collaboration. Wikis allow multiple users to contribute to groupwork by being able to work in real time to organize and edit the content. It also allows for documents to be be written collectively using a very simple markup. It allows users to work on single page or to link multiple pages together. One of the best attributes of wikis is the document management features that are available. Wikis allow group leaders to organize people into groups and monitor document history, content, and contributions from each of the group members. Wikis are used as a depository for various files and pages, and save documents at multiple stages so that users can go back to previous versions to see what changes have been made and by whom.

For this project, our group created a wiki on www.wikispaces.com. This website provides limited working wikis for free. We were able to create the main page online and we each had the ability to login to the wiki and edit the pages of our report. The wiki management tools were rather robust. The features included the ability to invite members to work on the wiki, the ability to add files, it has a discussion board, and a messaging feature. It also has a history to show all the changes made to the wiki. Additionally, it gave us the ability to view previous versions of the documents as well as what changes were made between versions.

Some of the major drawbacks of the wiki was the text editing tool. It is not as powerful as Microsoft Word and many of the formatting features are limited. However, the good news is that it is adequate to get all the information into one document and when we were done all we had to do was copy the information into Word to finish the final formatting and editing.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) is an international investment bank which is a part of Dresdner Bank. With headquarters in Europe, Frankfurt, and London, DrKW provides capital markets and advisory services. Some of the services include providing risk management solutions, structured finance for funding of large scale projects, and listing companies that wish to go on market. With 6000 employees, its offices are located in many different locations, such as New York, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Having such a large geographical distribution and diverse culture of its members, DrKW required a means for the employees to communicate with each other more efficiently. Collaborative tools such as blogs, chat, conferencing, and wiki were used. Before 1997, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein was using different software packages operating side by side for content management and group communication (Documentum, Media Surface, and MS FrontPage). Among the different group communication software, Microsoft Sharepoint was DrKW's most popular collaboration tool. However, this system was cumbersome since it often restricted data instead of making it transparent for the other employees and not very well integrated into the company. As a result, the company searches a better collaboration tool that can improve communication more among its different locations and business groups.
 * DrKW's BACKGROUND**

In 1997 J.P. Rangaswami, Dresdner's global chief information officer (CIO) backed open-source software for the OS and the servers for DrKW (43% of the UNIX user base is on Linux) to save money. On that year, DrkW started using MS SharePoint along with their first wikiWiki as a group decision support system, but at that time it was only being used by their IT department. Some of the popular uses for the wiki were to manage meetings, brainstorming and publishing, and to create presentations. As the implementation was highly successful in IT department, they wanted their business people to be a part of wiki so that they can create a platform on which both the IT and the business people could communicate and collaborate. By December 2003 after 3 years of IT budget and staff cutting, approximately about 43% for each, technology had allowed them to do more with less. With a smaller operating budget, CIO Rangaswami was demanding from the vendors plug-in-play products rather than the traditional software of customize and implementation. Additionally, while the completion was outsourcing the routine tasks, he found that it cost more money than keeping the work in house because of the attrition rates that were running at 40 to 50 percent and the additional supervision costs. Many companies were also looking for solutions to “the email blow-off factor” (deleted and unread emails because of excessive span) on company computers, cell phones, and blackberries that was happening to all of them. After DrKW announced their Socialtext wiki plan an “Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009” (business week Nov.28, 2005). 
 * CASE QUESTIONS **

Wikis are a collaboration tool that allows users to collaborate with other members on the site with many more features that email does not provide. Unlike email that focuses more on communicating and transferring files among specific addressees, wiki improves communications in more collaborative way and is a space for the publishing of key information among its users since it allows users to swap among different modes of communications (e.g. blog, intranet, instant messenger) on a single platform. A wiki provides an instant editable collaboration platform that allows users to view, edit, publish, and store information. Therefore, it provides a medium for brainstorming ideas, developing a document or meeting agenda, collaboratively forming presentation ideas or slides, and storing important information. Wiki’s users are able to develop the ideas, put them into an outline, assemble the content, edit, and publish information on a single page. Therefore, it replaces the traditional way of sending countless numbers of emails with different versions of data that ends up cluttering up email inboxs and confusing the users. In addition to the collaboration feature, wiki users can store commonly used information, such as best practice guidelines, FAQs, and cheat-sheets, on wiki space. This storage feature benefits wiki users in many ways. First, it provides up-to-date guidelines for new and existing employees. Since all of the wiki users can view and update the content, the data stored in wiki can be utilized as a training tool for all of the employees. Second, the storage function reduces operational risks when employees leave the company. Basically, s ucceeding employees can find and continue the previous employees' works if they happen to save them on wiki space. Since wiki users are able to publish information, they are able to give instant feedback on the content of what other users have uploaded, this motivates the group to collaborate more in order to produce the best quality works. In addition, users often publish the status of their projects asynchronously from different locations on wiki space. As a result, it reduces the length of time of a traditional meeting because the time is not wasted at every meeting on relaying the status of the project to its members. As a result, management can utilize the time to discuss more important issues during meeting such as, discussing problems, solving issues, and developing innovated ideas.
 * 1. What capabilities of a wiki are not available in e-mail? **


 * 2. Describe the applications of wikis in finance and operations. **

A wiki is used to improve communication and collaboration among its users which lead to higher efficiency, productivity, and creativity, in turn this will achieve more desirable outcomes. Since users can publish and edit wiki content, a wiki improves intra-team communication by providing a medium to collect resources within the team. Furthermore, wikis are a web based collaboration tool and global wiki users are able to share the internal wiki application across different locations. For example, wiki users in Europe can access the wiki via eu.socialtext.net with the help of a Socialtexts new European proxy server, this improved the wiki loading speeds in Europe, while wiki users in London can access the same wiki the way the rest of the world does though [|www.socialtext.net].
 * __Operations & IT__ **

The wiki facilitates open communication among all of its users and provides a friendly forum for exchanging ideas, stimulating debates, and generating great ideas. All of wiki users are able to voice their ideas by publishing it on the wiki. Unlike in the regular meeting, shy wiki users feel less intimidated to voice their opinion on wiki space since they do not need to stand up and face all of the meeting attendees while sharing their idea. In addition, the wiki also creates friendlier forum to share important information to the rest of the users. For example, linking an important live website to other wiki users is a lot easier, friendlier, and less formal compared to attaching suggested site onto a document and sending it to a specific users via email.

The wiki collaboration feature also allows users to publish the status on what they are working on to the rest of the users. As a result, it improves productivity and team coordination since everyone from different locations can see the status of what everyone else is working on. The storage feature on wiki allows company to keep and share best practice guidelines, internal jargon, and a cheat sheet among the rest of the employees. Therefore, it can be used as training tool as it provides resources for day to day employee operation. A wiki can also help users to manage meetings. First, the wiki increases the effectiveness of developing a meeting agenda. Users can keep an archive of old agendas and use them to create new ones by using **//duplicate page//** function**//.//** Therefore, they do not need to create the agenda from scratch whenever there is a meeting. Then management can use the **//email page//** function to draw attention about the proposed agenda to all of the wiki users <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">and get their inputs. Second, a meeting organizer can put the agenda in wiki for everyone else to view rather than distributing them through hard copies or emails them to all meeting attendees. Third, management can use wiki to collect materials for meetings. Since meeting attendees can upload their parts on wiki and edit the layout of the content collaboratively, wiki speeds up the meeting coordinators' effort on puting together meeting materials. Basically, it meeting organizer does not need to wait for everyone to submit his or her parts through an email before putting it all together manually.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Besides creating a forum to share ideas, the wiki collaboration tool also strengthens existing business relationships among employees, especially among employees who have never met face-to-face. By communicating through a wiki, wiki users have build a rapport with the rest of the employees from different levels, departments, and locations. In addition, the **//history//** function of wiki allows company to retain complete audit trail of any material posted on the site. As many business professionals become more comfortable with utilizing a wiki, users predict the future benefits of wikis as a medium to discuss contracts, negotiate contracts with clients, update contact information and other related business permanent info.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">__Finance__ **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">3. How does DrKW’s wiki increase employee productivity? **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Since a wiki provides open forum where users can share, edit, publish email conversations, presentations, reports, and documents, it improves communications and collaboration of all of DrKW’s employees. By using **//WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor//** function, the wiki users have an editing interface that can change the data uploaded in the wiki with similar editing features as found on MS Word and Excel spreadsheets. Therefore, it encourage more users' participation and collaboration since wiki users can get an instant feedback from the rest of the wiki users, which leads to increase productivity.

DrKW wiki users can also publish status update on what they are working on. Consequently, a project coordinator will be able to coordinate the team more efficiently and plan follow up actions that need to be done to finish up the projects. And it is seems that project status updates usually become the basis of the traditional weekly teleconference. Rather than spending a lot of time getting project status updates, management can focus more on solving problems, looking into solutions, being innovative, and planning the next steps during the meeting. Lastly, wiki’s capability to publish key information and store best practice guidelines, frequently asked questions, and company’s jargon are also used by DrKW as an informal training tool. This feature allows users to post questions, quickly get answer from their questions, and look up information.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">4. How does DrKW’s wiki help with foreign languages and training? **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Since the wiki provides an instant editable collaboration platform that allows wiki users from different locations to publish general information or company’s internal jargon, ask question, and exchange ideas, the wiki can be used as an effective and efficient training tool for new and existing employees. Similarly, wiki also offers a medium for wiki users to learn foreign language. Unlike traditional textbooks, it allows users to create and collaboratively edit web pages using text, video, sound, and pictures while learning foreign language (Italki.com, 2008). In addition, since wiki content is supported by diverse wiki users who are capable to edit the content, wiki users are able to find information not only on the popular language but also less popular one. Italki is one example of the free, user-generated language-learning textbooks that utilizes wiki capability.

Groupwork is an integral function of organization and it is becoming more vital with the increase in globalization for firms. As shown in this paper, it is important for organizations to continue to use collaborative toools, such as wikis, to help them increasing efficiency and effectiveness and while reducing costs. The DrKW case is a great example of how this could be done. Also, our group utilized a wiki at wikispaces.com to work together on this paper and our powerpoint presentation. We were able to work on one document for the paper. We were able to go to one location to see the history of who worked on the document and what changes they made. We were also able to keep a history of older versions. We were able to see all email correspondence in one place and utilize a discussion board. We were also able to post files. While there are some challenges and an initial learning curve to using a wiki, overall it is a great tool for group work.
 * SUMMARY/CONCLUSION **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">Decision Support and Business Intelligence Systems 9th Edition, Turban, Efraim, Sharda, Ramesh, Delen, Dursun 2010. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein Case Study. Retrieved from www.**socialtext.com**/files/ DrKW **Case** **Study**.pdf Italki.com. 2008. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Foreign Language Education Wiki Makes Language Learning Free for Everyone. Retrieved from <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; text-decoration: none;">[]
 * RESOURCES **