- Brahim Jaouane
- September 20, 2016
Four Ways to Use an Enterprise Wiki
Enterprise wikis are designed to be simple collaborative documentation engines and easy to use in a corporate context.
One of the intents of a wiki is to avoid formal publication and limit formatting options. Unlike CMSs, wikis focus on allowing people to read and contribute content. The collaborative model of a wiki explicitly encourages broad and open participation.
Content
Despite its laudable intentions, the wiki software packages remain very generic tools for free collaboration. So where to start? How can a company leverage its Enterprise Wiki? Here are some use cases that we’ve seen with our customers.
1. Knowledge Base Wiki
Centralizing the expertise of a company is a classic challenge that many companies are trying to address by setting up internal knowledge bases. If it’s well managed, it is the intellectual capital of the company. You can find information about customers, products, processes, and the collective memory of past experiences.
Here are some examples :
- Customer Base: Make a description of each customer—year, sector, country, products purchased, etc.—available to everyone. Attach any intervention reports and all kinds of documents that you’ve exchanged with them.
- Technical Support: Troubleshooting and maintenance procedures for your products, tips, and safety instructions are all necessary to support your customers. Take every opportunity to record this knowledge and make the lives of your support staff easier. This will reduce your costs significantly while increasing customer satisfaction. Good quality support materials can be made public so that your customers can access them if they wish, potentially reducing the load on your customer support staff.
- Internal IT Support: In the same spirit, your IT department could establish a base of articles that help employees to solve common problems, such as when the database is unavailable, email is no longer coming, or documents won’t print anymore.
- Training: To complete reference documentation for your products, you can assemble practical tutorials for your customers (and your employees) to facilitate their training.
- Process Base: Formalize your business processes in a knowledge base wiki to allow your employees to refer to it in case of doubt. This is a way to accelerate their onboarding and save time for your managers.
- Corporate Memory: Retrospectives, 5-Whys, and post-mortem meetings are techniques you can implement with a wiki, and avoid making the same mistakes again and again. Document them in your knowledge base wiki so staff who are facing complicated situations can benefit from the experience of others. Similarly, document major decisions for future reference.
With their automatic versioning functions, full text search, permissions management, inter-relationships, and page templates, corporate wikis are ideal for building and managing a rich knowledge base.
To ensure good quality contributions, prepare well-structured article templates with a header that summarizes key metadata, such as author, date of update, the relevant context, links to resources, or additional sources.
Finally, in systems that support multiple wikis, you can mount multiple knowledge bases in parallel for different audiences.
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2. Project Collaboration Wiki
Whether it has a project management culture or not, any business typically hosts a multitude of projects that require interdepartmental collaboration. The various actors must communicate effectively among themselves and coordinate their actions to complete the project.
Inevitably, your projects will be punctuated by launch meetings, presentations, workshops, brainstorming sessions, and other gatherings. Using another dedicated page template, make a habit of recording the minutes and notes in a project collaboration wiki. Organize them by date and highlight the presenters, topics, decisions, and new actions. By initializing the page in advance you can even enable participants to add items to the agenda directly by modifying the page.
Over time, you will build a centralized memory of your project and the wiki can serve as a reference for absentees returning for an update as well as newcomers to the project.
Similarly, a wiki is handy to achieve a high level project schedule that can be easily shared, updated, and maintained collectively. Although more rudimentary than a professional planning tool, planning on wikis lets you easily document the key steps of your project and indicate the stakeholders at each stage. The advantage of this shared schedule on wiki is that it can be easily accessed and amended by all project members.
You can also add any kind of information to the wiki for your project that helps the team to work effectively—for instance, guidelines, project objectives, links to reference documents, or even contact information and directions.
Finally, if your project requires the development of documentation, the open nature of a wiki is ideal for developing it collegially.
In summary, through the project collaboration wiki, all the information and organizing your project needs can be centralized in an open environment that allows two-way communication. This is a way to foster the contribution of all participants’ own ideas, which will allow your project to achieve better results.
3. Wiki for Team Collaboration
Whether it has adopted a hierarchical, matrix, or other organizational model, any business forms more or less permanent teams that have their own charge, area of responsibility, and tools and practices. Providing a wiki to an organizational team can be a good way to boost its effectiveness.
First, recording the procedures and processes of the team in the wiki will make them easily accessible to newcomers or team members who simply need to refresh their memory. For example, a marketing team can document the process for publishing a blog post, the pointers to the SEO analysis reports, or a tutorial on updating the home banner of the company website. By allowing everyone to comment on and develop these procedures, you establish a certain collegiality that can increase the effectiveness, motivation, and cohesiveness of the group.
The team collaboration wiki is also the perfect place to share reports or corporate memos that directly affect the activity of the team. If your tools and logins are shared, document them in the wiki as well, safely ensuring that only members of your team have access to this information.
Another example? Your HR team certainly has maintenance models of typical job descriptions, procedures for performance reviews, and training material for managers conducting candidate interviews.
Although documenting all these processes takes some effort, it can be well worth it: a wiki facilitates the contribution, review, and evolution of all this documentation and ensures that it’s always up to date.
4. Wiki as an Employee Handbook
One of the major concerns of all HR departments is to ensure the successful onboarding of newcomers so they can fit into the corporate culture and get up and running quickly.
A wiki is ideal for recording the policies and values of the company and providing up-to-date information on employee benefits like health insurance, retirement or savings plans and even pet insurance for those employees that have pets.. A less formal but practical application is a page with frequently used telephone numbers, for instance, of caterers who will bring lunch to a meeting room, the car rental partner, or the procedure to book the conference rooms. In addition to the benefits mentioned above, IPC can also help to improve the management of hair loss conditions for women that sometimes lead the ladies to a lot of problems such as anxiety, depression, and stress. By working together, different healthcare professionals can provide patients with a more comprehensive and coordinated plan of care, including education about medications such as spironolactone, etc.
Again, the open nature of the wiki is its advantage over the battery of PDF documents where this information is often recorded. We’re not recommending that anyone can edit this kind of information, but embedded comments do allow everyone to give valuable feedback and ideas that HR can use to complement and enhance the information already available. Often wikis provide a watch function that notifies the group when a page changes. This facilitates the dissemination of information and enables you to correct errors quickly.
Finally, the wiki can be home to practical information that all employees can contribute and use, such as the best places in the area for lunch or after-work drinks, nearby sports venues, or the best local drycleaner. By allowing everyone to share their discoveries, you give them the opportunity to feel useful to their colleagues and share some personal knowledge. All this contributes to the well-being of employees and promotes a sense of cohesiveness and camaraderie.
We’ve seen our clients use wiki software for a variety of uses and at a variety of intensities. If you have implemented an Enterprise wiki or if you’re bouncing around some ideas of how your particular business might use an Enterprise wiki, feel free to leave a comment.
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FAQ
You will find here Frequently Asked Questions about collaboration with all the answers in one place.
What is collaboration?
Collaboration is “the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing”.
What are the different types of collaboration in business?
Here are some definitions of digital workplace:
- Team collaboration
- Cross-departmental and interdisciplinary collaboration
- Community collaboration
- Strategic partnerships and alliances
- Supply chain collaboration
How to choose the best type of collaboration?
In order to effectively find the right type of collaboration for your business, you have to follow a strategic approach and answer three common yet critical questions: Where are we? Where do we want to be? And how to get there?
Why collaboration is important?
At the internal level, businesses try to encourage and seek to incorporate different forms of collaboration in the workplace to lay the foundations for teams to be able to work together with an aim to achieve higher levels of success.
Externally, businesses look to engage in collaborative actions to benefit from others’ expertise, to gather the opinions of their customer base and to get customers and other stakeholders more involved in the development of products and services.
What are the benefits of collaboration in the workplace?
Here are some of the benefits of collaboration in the workplace:
- Foster innovation and creativity
- Better problem solving
- Effectively handle times of crises
- Engage and align teams
- Increase motivation
- Attract talents
Julian dubois
Je suis expert solution chez eXo Platform.
Mon rôle est d’accompagner les clients dans le déploiement de leur projet de plateforme et l’accompagnement au changement lié à ce projet. J’ai piloté et administré une Digital Workplace pendant 3 ans avant de rejoindre eXo Platform.
Améliorer l’environnement et les conditions de travail m’a toujours passioné, je peux maintenant accompagner nos clients dans cette démarche.
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