Wikis have a growing reputation on the open Internet for producing evolving stores of shared knowledge. However, such democratic systems are often treated with suspicion within corporations for management, legal, social, and other reasons. This article describes a field study of a corporate Wiki that has been developed to capture, and make available, organisational knowledge in a large manufacturing company as an initiative of their Knowledge Management (KM) program. As this approach to KM is a controversial and rapidly changing phenomenon, a Q Methodology research approach was selected to uncover employees’ subjective attitudes to the Wiki. Activity Theory was used to provide a deeper interpretation of the findings of the Q-study. The results are enabling the firm to more fully exploit the potential of the Wiki as a ubiquitous tool for successful tacit and explicit knowledge management as more employees are encouraged to participate in a process of cocreating the store of corporate knowledge. The article also demonstrates how meaningful and rigorous research on this new democratic direction of corporate KM should continue.

Feature interaction, in the context of telecommunications, is the phenomenon where a user (end-user or system operator) observes services failing to perform as expected, and where the failures are due to the presence of other services (or multiple instances of a single service) in the network. We propose an architectural approach to minimize the problem of feature interaction while increasing the reusability of software for services. Our approach recognizes that currently many assumptions about service operations and system capabilities are implicitly built into the service software architecture. We claim that many nontrivial feature interactions arise when services or technologies with new capabilities, based on conflicting assumptions, are introduced. We propose an architecture based on software agents and separation of concerns. A processing model for service-independent interaction management within the agent architecture is discussed. This architecture effectively removes many common assumptions about roles and technology from the service software architecture, thus reducing the need to provide ad hoc solutions to particular feature interactions. We demonstrate the power of such an architecture by showing how it deals with examples of interactions among existing services, interactions introduced by Universal Personal Telecommunications (UPT), and its applicability to emerging broadband and multimedia service requirements. We also consider the architecture in the context of the intelligent network.