An interesting case study on the major adoption of wiki software in a large organization (Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, an international investment bank):

One of the biggest users of Socialtext in DrKW is the Equity Delta1 equity financing team -- led by Darren Lennard, Global Co-Head -- which deals with stock loans, equity swaps, and structured equity-like financing.

The team suffered from having too much email to deal with, which made communication clumsy and difficult. They neededed a collaborative working methodology for the development of business plans and for process analysis. They also needed to have some way of storing commonly-used information that was more usable than a simple file dump.

Equity Delta1 uses the Socialtext workspace in a number of ways.

As new topics come up, such as which clients they cover or how they analyse their business, they create an open forum where anyone can post views, comments and questions on given subjects. When it matures, the discussion becomes a formal page. They also use the wiki to publish and share white papers and bulletins, coordinating sales and marketing activities, and discussing and organizing critical team tasks.

Because discussion is now happening on the wiki, email usage has dropped significantly. The Equity Delta1 team's intention is to make Socialtext their sole means of communication and indeed they are already using it daily.

However, the team are still learning how best to use Socialtext, and still see it as an equivalent to shared folders and files rather than as a more versatile collaboration tool. There has also been resistance to the openness of the wiki. The Delta1 workspace is separate to the DrKWikipedia (which is accessible to any employee of DrKW), and without this privacy, Lennard believes that his team would not have adopted it so rapidly. But once use of the Delta1 wiki matures, it will be ported over to the DrKWikipedia wiki.

...via Many-to-Many