Q1.

What does this case study

suggest are the main challenges
for different stages of introducing
a wiki or other Web 2.0
approaches in a large
organization?
The main challenges for introducing a Wiki or
other Web 2.0 approaches in a large
organization are:
MBA FT- 7601 1. Lack of Clear Purpose
Managing E-Business Many employees of the organization don’t
even know what the problem is. They become
so adapted to the current way of working that
they turn an ignorant eye towards the probable
solutions. If change feels like walking off a cliff
Case Study 3 – blindfolded, then people will reject it. People
will often prefer to remain mired in misery than
Janssen-Cilag Wiki to head toward an unknown. As the saying
goes, “Better the devil you know than the devil
Solution you don’t know.” To overcome inertia requires
a sense of safety as well as an inspiring vision.
It is extremely important for senior
management to bring each and every person on
Submitted To: the same table regarding the issues at hand so
that they know the clear purpose of
Prof. Jyoti Prakash Das implementing the change. This helps to
remove the usual barrier that employees have
towards the change.

Submitted By: 2. Familiarity

Group-4 Familiarity with the concept that is being
implemented is important since if people aren’t
127 Lakshya aware of the new concept, they’ll find it hard to
166 Aayush Goyal adhere to the change. In the given case study,
217 Baishali Roy people had used Wikipedia to find information
in the past, so there were no objections to the
245 Sachin Kumar
concept but if people wouldn’t have been
304 Abhishek Kumar familiar, they would need time and energy to
359 Aditya Turalapati get used to the new concept, which is tiresome
to an extent so may propagate resistance to

1
change. Thus, either the familiar concepts must
be used or people might be given a prototype
of the concept so that they can familiarize
themselves to that concept.
3. Accountability (in Open Source)
Since the Wiki-style is based on open source, it
raises issues on the accountability of the
information. People might argue for a
regulatory control on the information which in
itself is very difficult to handle because of the
quantity and diversity of data involved in the
working of an organization. The verification of
the data, too may be a tiresome process. This
could also result in probable quarrels among
the employees as well as the environment of
distrust may inhibit the organization. A proper
procedure must be there for accountability of
the information present on the server.
4. Selection of Alternative and
Functional Challenges
In order to implement the concept, there needs
to be evaluation of alternatives present in the
market. This could involve feature or quality
trade-off and organizations must seek the
alternative best suited to them. In the case
study given, Janssen-Cilag went ahead with
Confluence by Atlassian. The selection also
included functional challenges like Hierarchy
of Pages, LDAP Integration, News Feature,
High Quality Search, Decent Rich Text Editor,
and Strong attachment capabilities. Similarly,
an organization needs to check for these
challenges and it should try to find a solution.
5. Simplicity
If the change is an organizational level change,
then simplicity needs to be ensured. Otherwise
too, any new change must be simple and easy
to implement. It will enable people to adopt the
change quickly and engagement will increase.
In the case study, the change is organizational
2
level (The Intranet). This change could involve
many complexities like feature overloading,
information overloading, etc. and the
organization needs to beware of that. Any
change when simple, counters the resistance
and is welcomed easily into the organization.
6. Pilot Launch
It is very important that a pilot launch be a
success, and this includes the time taken by
employees to adopt it, the employees’
feedback, etc. If the pilot launch becomes a
success, then only the concept or the change
will be implemented in the organization. On
other hand, if the pilot launch fails or even if it
experiences a minor problem, questions may
be raised about the change. In worst cases, this
may lead to scrapping the idea of change.
7. User Training
This is one of the crucial challenges before
implementing a change. Employees need to be
trained on using the new technology or service.
Since the change is being done on the
organizational level, it is imperative to have
some kind of arrangement where the queries of
the employees could be addressed and
resolved. This challenge includes several sub-
challenges like - What training needs to be
delivered; Who will deliver the training; Who
will develop the training material; Distribution
of Training Material, etc.
8. Adoption and Trust
Since Wiki-Style solution is an open source
solution, it needs each and every employee to
participate and adopt in order for it to be
successful. It is imperative in such a concept
that employees adopt it quickly. Even after
training, people may find it difficult to adopt
since they are more used to the previous
methods. Organizations must work to break
these barriers. The other challenge that they
may face is the issue of trust on the new
concept. Since the previous infrastructure was
quite outdated in the case study, it is not
surprising that employees would find it hard to
rely on the new infrastructure since the
information used to be outdated. It is
important for the new
concept/change/technology to work fine and
deliver results in order for people to trust it.
9. Getting People to Contribute
Now, the employees might adopt the platform
but they should also be encouraged to
contribute, be it changes in the content or
giving the feedback in order for the system to
be updated and error-free. Without people
contributing, the platform would soon become
stagnant, an undesired outcome. The
encouragement shouldn’t be one time, they
should be regularly motivated to engage on the
platform and contribute.
10. People’s Time
Since this platform is open source, people will
be required to put in their time in this along
with their work, so this is extra-work for them.
It may pose a challenge as people aren’t being
paid for this work but it is also imperative to
maintain the correct and updated
organizational information on the platform.
On the other hand, it will struggle for people’s
time, and this may actually prevent them from
doing their own work.
Q2. Which solutions does Nathan
Wallace describe as being
effective for overcoming these
problems?
The solutions described by Nathan Wallace
were as follows:
Issue: Lack of Purpose
3
Solution: Although the culture at Janssen-
Cilag is highly consultative and relationship-
based, Nathan Wallace interviewed many
employees on the requirement if a new Intranet
site. He also held a series of conversations and
discussions, and building a coalition of
support. This helped not only in knowing the
views of the employees but also interacting
with them and discuss the problem at hand.
This enabled employees (to some extent) to
understand the problem at hand. Each
discussion varied differently but these
discussions established the purpose of
introducing and implementing a change in the
organization. Thus, establishing
communication and talking about the
problem is imperative to establish the
purpose of change.
Issue: Familiarity
Solution: This is one of the significant
problem which may be encountered when
introducing a change. In the case study,
however, this wasn’t a problem since Nathan
Wallace chose Wiki, which was a powerful way
to seal the deal, because the employees have
used it often in the past in order to search for
information in the past. Thus, there were no
major obstructions for implementing a Wiki-
Style Concept. Thus, one should try to find
a concept which the employees are more
familiar with.
Issue: Accountability
Solution: Since this change is open-source in
nature, accountability is one of the major
issues. In order to take care of this problem,
Nathan Wallace did the following:
a. Track of the history of changes, so mistakes
can be quickly undone and irresponsible
individuals could be held for anything
improper.
b. There are two ways to control the behavior
of people: social forces and technical forces.
He was relying on social forces to keep people
from messing up with the information because
with the technical force, people might become
less engaged in the platform. But he was willing
to put restrictions on most critical content.
Also, anyone could monitor the matter,
important to him/her and they could work on
the system to have automatic email alerts for
any changes in that matter. They could then
correct the matter if there is any mistake. For
some critical content, responsibility could be
given to an authority for its maintenance.
Issue: Selection of Alternative and
Functional Challenges
Solution: Nathan Wallace evaluated a wide
range of alternatives including MediaWiki,
TWiki and FlexWiki, etc. but selected
Confluence by Atlassian. Major concerns
regarding the decision were support for a
hierarchy of pages, strong attachment
capabilities, news features, LDAP integration,
high quality search and a decent rich text
editor, which too were curated by Nathan.
Integration with LDAP and use of NTLM for
automatic single sign on was essential. So, they
even hacked someone’s starting point and
open sourced their improved version. Rich text
editing was required and made as Word-like as
possible. Users like hierarchy and structure, the
Wiki should not feel disorganized or
completely free-form (Confluence supported
this with an exact page hierarchy capability).
Issue: Simplicity
Solution: It was always at the back of the mind
of Nathan Wallace that the new system should
be easily editable and should be simple in
nature. Their customization focused almost
completely on the usability. They wanted that
people shouldn’t know or care that they are
4
using a Wiki and should only focus on whether
they can easily browse, search and contribute
content. In fact, after 16 months, only a small
set of Janssen-Cilag staff thought of Intranet as
a Wiki. To them, it just seemed natural that
Intranet software would have evolved to
something this simple to use. Nathan also
sacrificed power and flexibility for simplicity.
For example, their page design was fixed into a
title, alphabetical list of subpages, page content,
and alphabetical list of attachments. While it
would be nice to be able to change this at times,
or order the attachments, or change the look
and feel; it’s far more important that everyone
can contribute and clearly understands how
things work. He also removed many
unnecessary features. For example, labels were
a great idea, but they already had hierarchy and
most users didn’t really know what labels were.
Issue: Pilot Launch
Solution: Nathan started the new site as a
pilot, launching as the source of information
for a relocation of our head office. Nothing
drives traffic like the seating plan for a new
office, and thus it caught attention of
employees. Information around the relocation
was fast moving and changing daily for the two
weeks between announcement of the move
and the actual day of relocation. Thus, in order
to test pilot and launch it successfully, Nathan
decided to put up something which really
caught the attention of the employees. Building
on that success, Nathan obtained executive
approval to replace the existing Intranet.
Issue: User Training
Solution: Nathan worked with key content
owners (most particularly HR) to show them
how to create pages and migrate appropriate
information. They made the decision to not
automatically migrate any content, mostly
because it was so old and trust in the existing
intranet information was so low. Also, during
the launch, they switched the site to live, and productivity of the individuals. Moreover,
described the working of site in five minutes. critical data will not be lost which later on
That launch presentation remains the only could be termed useful.
formal training they’ve ever provided on how
to use the system. This also shows the
simplicity of the system. Continuing training
was provided through short one-on-one
demonstrations. Their philosophy was ‘we only
show, we never do’. They also introduced a
detailed help section page for any queries that
employees might have.

Issue: Adoption, Trust and Getting

People to Collaborate
Solution: To drive adoption, they’ve primarily
focused on owning the flow of new
information. Early on, they established a policy
that all announcements must be on JCintra.
When necessary, they may be sent via email in
addition to posting as news on the Intranet.
Owning the flow of news has established
JCintra as a trusted source for the latest
information. This translates into an
expectation that the stocks of information (e.g.
policies) will be available and up to date. As a
result, announcements ranging from major
restructures to new babies for employees flow
through the news page without clogging up
email inboxes. The adoption of JCintra has
been remarkable. After only 3 months, 111
people had contributed more than 5,000
changes. After 12 months, they had 18,000
contributions from 184 people within the
business. Most significantly, the contributions
per month has continued to grow since launch.
People are engaging and collaborating more
with time.

Issue: People’s Time

Probable Solution: This issues still remained
a challenge but this overall process would
result in effective overall communication
which would actually result in the enhanced