A Perfect Example of Why Management Should Trust Their Staff

November 20, 2008

I am convinced that micro-management is responsible for much of the inefficiencies that occur within businesses. Employees don't feel trusted to accomplish tasks on their own, so they are not likely to feel empowered enough to innovate. Micro-managers have to work 70+ hours a week to take care of their job, along with everyone else on their staff. Executives (assuming they are not micro-managers themselves), see less getting done because their managers are exhausted and the staff isn't contributing what it could.

This is why I enjoy working at BrainKeeper. We use our enterprise wiki software extensively as our intranet, for all of our knowledge management, and as an extranet to interact with our partners and vendors. We have found that our product really does foster collaboration and our employees feel empowered to contribute knowledge to help get things done and move the company forward. It is a great feeling to know the incredible benefits we can provide to an organization when it is implemented properly- which means that everyone is trusted to have full access to the wiki.

Many of our potential clients have some degree of concern over allowing their entire organization to have the ability to contribute whatever they want. We do have content restoration, audit trails for everything, permissions, etc.- but the truth is that the more open your wiki is, the better your result will be. Enhanced collaboration means more ideas from more people to solve more problems. Everyone is an expert in something, and everyone has something positive to contribute.

People want to help and they want to be a part of something successful. By giving your team an enterprise wiki- and trusting them to use it- you will be amazed at how much more productive you can be.

What is your Knowledge Contingency Plan?

November 17, 2008

Poor economic climates, such as the one we find ourselves in now, force businesses and organizations to cut back. Some organizations do this more intelligently than others, but in general, people are nervous. They could certainly be nervous about their own job- but consider that people could be losing resources from contracted or outsourced work, or losing support from people they depend on. These challenges are worrisome for management as well. It should be a major concern for your organization.

When you lose people, you lose the knowledge, expertise and experience that they brought to your company. You need a way to protect yourself from losing access to this information- you need a Knowledge Contingency Plan. An enterprise wiki is an easy solution to this problem. You can set one up in minutes, and store your most critical documents, decisions, answers and ideas- all in a single system.

You are going to be asked to do more with less. Make sure you have the resources you need to keep working on your critical projects. If you need help to create a Knowledge Contingency Plan, we have the tools to help you- contact us today!

Build an intranet in under 10 minutes

October 26, 2008

Corporate intranets are used for everything from a centralized set of web links to a comprehensive information center for everyone in an organization. It is relatively easy and cheap to create a simple intranet, but there is not much value. Creating an intranet that contains all of your organization's information can take months, and you can spend thousands of dollars to create it. The time and money to get up and running (and to maintain it) rarely gives you the ROI you are looking for.

However, you can create a BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki, add users from your team, and start creating your first page of content in less than 10 minutes. No need to burden your IT team or take resources away from other projects. BrainKeeper is one of the fastest solutions to implement on the market, and you can get your team started for under $50 a month- which is usually well within any budget.

BrainKeeper gives you everything you need to capture and share your knowledge. You also get excellet business collaboration features to automatically grow your intranet. So, what about the content? While BrainKeeper does offer a number of features that make it much easier to get content into your wiki, it does take a bit of time to get information out of email inboxes, shared drives, and people's heads. However, one of the great things about using a wiki is that everyone has the ability (and the responsibility) to add content that is relevant for the organization.

When an intranet is allowed to grow organically, you remove much of the maintenance burden while also capturing the most relevant, important information. When you let your people decide what needs to be shared, you significantly reduce your maintenance burden, and everyone has a stake in keeping their content up to date. BrainKeeper is a great solution to quickly create a new intranet for your organization.

5 ways that wikis help you cut costs

October 17, 2008

With all of the woefully bad economic news over the past several weeks, organizations are naturally looking to cut costs. This usually takes the form of delaying projects, cutting back on outsourcing and contracted work, and generally trying to do more with less. These are hard decisions to make, and the downstream effects can be quite harmful to productivity. So, how do you make sure that you stay on track when your resources are scarce?

Here are 5 ways that an enterprise collaboration tool can help:

Prevent knowledge loss. Cutting resources is a very difficult decision to make because the organization loses the knowledge that departing employees have. This means that people are not as productive because answers are no longer readily available. However, if you use a wiki for knowledge management, you never have to worry about key information leaving your organization.
More effective use of resources. Enterprise collaboration software can help you do the same work with fewer resources. Instead of preparing reports and having meetings to discuss things like competitors, industry news, and company issues- capture those things in BrainKeeper and let the software distribute that information and collect feedback. You can get back hours of your day!
Make decisions and execute. Meetings are not needed to make every decision. And most everyone has regretted making some decision over email (you didn't CC the right people, responses were misinterpreted, etc.). Use BrainKeeper Forums to quickly gather feedback and opinions from everyone, and make the best decision.
Keep track of stalled projects. When resources are cut or reassigned, projects can be halted for weeks or even months. If your discussions, decisions, analysis, ideas, and strategies are all kept within collaboration software- you can pick up right where you left off.
Be prepared for next time. The economy rises and falls, just as your revenues and resources do. By using an enterprise wiki, you can make the best possible decisions for your organization. While your competitors are struggling, you will be able to stay on track and have a significant advantage under any market conditions.

5 Great Ways to Update Your Wiki

September 22, 2008

We have written about BrainKeeper being a great collaboration solution for your organization's collaboration strategy, but there are a number of easy things that you can do right now to ensure your wiki stays up to date and continues to be a valuable resource for everyone. Here are 5 things that you can do to update your enterprise wiki:

1. Put content where people will find it. This seems simple, but just dropping a wiki page into a Workspace might result in it being lost. Also, don't be afraid to put in the effort to change things around when you feel it is necessary. The extra time and effort that you spend to reorganize your content can make a huge difference.

2. Create "linkable" wiki pages. What this means is to take content that relates to many other topics, and dedicate a single page to it. This makes it easier for people to refer to more targeted information. For example, if you have a client that is also a partner, you may have details about that company in multiple pages. By putting all of the client/partner information into a wiki page by itself, anyone can link to that page to get all of the important details they need.

3. Combine similar pages, break up long ones. Often, multiple pages are created that are very closely related, have duplicate content, or naturally seem to fit together. Combining these into few pages will help you create a single 'authority' on a particular topic. The other side of this is that pages can become very long and cumbersome to read. Where there are natural sub-topics, you can create sub-pages so that people can better target the information they are looking for.

4. Understand and analyze to what you do. Often, valuable insights can be gained by thinking about what was removed, combined, moved or broken apart. This will help teach others about the best way to contribute information in the future, so that the process can essentially manage itself.

5. Engage people. Create a Forum to discuss ways in which you can better use your wiki. Or, discuss the features that you would like to see added to BrainKeeper to make it a better tool for you. You can even invite us to these conversations so that you can hear our perspective and thoughts about your ideas. You might be the source for our next great feature!

Want more tips, ideas, and best practices for your wiki? Just let us know, and we would be happy to help in any way we can.

The Hidden Value of Wikis

September 16, 2008

Giving everyone in your organization the ability to contribute new information, modify knowledge that is outdated, and delete content that is inaccurate or irrelevant are some of the core benefits that you get from having an enterprise wiki. The thought here is that it is in everyone's best interest to have the wiki as up-to-date, relevant, and complete as possible. But, there could be much more value in your wiki than just this.

In an environment where anyone can change the actual structure of your content, you have an opportunity to see how people really think about the information that they need to do their jobs. You can learn quite a bit about how your organization actually works (rather than how you think it works, or even how you want it to work).

For example, your organization may have many departments that work together on projects. Naturally, you would want to foster as much collaboration between the departments as possible, so you may create a Workspace for each project to accomplish this. As you continue to use the wiki, you might see new Workspaces being created for each department, with their own status updates, work product, and other bits of information. What can you learn from this?

Perhaps your organization is more stove-piped than you want it to be, or perhaps there are areas of your organization that should be more isolated. In either case, the way people have decided to use your wiki can tell you a lot about how collaboration actually happens. You might embrace this, or you might act to change it- but you have a great insight to determine how to move forward with your collaboration strategy.

Evolving Your Wiki Organically

August 25, 2008

There are a number of ways in which our Fortune 500 clients use the BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki differently than our small business subscribers. However, there is one thing that every wiki has in common: they all change as they grow. Beyond the obvious changes to the individual wiki pages, blog posts, and forum threads- most wikis will progress through a maturity process, where the underlying structure of the wiki itself is evolved to meet the changing needs of your organization and the information you are capturing.

Many of the things that you do as a 50-person organization will not work when you grow to be a 200-person organization- and the same logic should apply to the systems that you use to support your efforts. Regarding a wiki: you may start with just a few topic Workspaces, such as FAQs, Competitors, and Meeting Minutes. This might work great for your team, but once other departments see the value that you are getting out of your BrainKeeper wiki, they will want to use it as well- so the structure needs to change to accommodate the additional needs.

There are a number of factors that can make you rethink the organization of your wiki, and you might consider this to be a daunting task. However, with features like an enterprise search, tagging, and custom search fields, you can minimize any re-training that needs to be done- and BrainKeeper even comes with a number of features to make it very easy to change the structure of your information. The extra time and effort spent to reorganize what you already have can really pay off in the long run.

The most important thing to know is that your wiki will grow and change organically. In most cases, you should encourage this, since people will be working to improve your wiki for everyone. You can also get some great insights to how people are using (or want to use) your wiki as your team evolves and grows. If you can successfully embrace and understand the change, you will foster a more collaborative environment- which can lead to improvements across your entire organization.

Capture Your Decisions AND the Reasons You Made Them

August 14, 2008

Often, people use a collaboration tool like Discussion Forums to make decisions. Through the collaborative process, you can determine the perceived impact, validity and relevancy of any idea you can dream up. This can apply to opinions, perspectives, or even generic thoughts, like "should we get rid of voicemail, so that it isn't a crutch to avoid talking to people?".

From the gathered information, decisions can be made that will be much more well informed because everyone is able to contribute to the process. Getting the information needed to make better decisions is great, but it is only part of the value that a discussion forum provides.

Lets say that you have created an action plan for a new great idea, but you didn't use an enterprise wiki tool to capture the details behind it. Then, for whatever reason, the execution of that action plan is delayed (there are any number of reasons to delay the implementation of a good idea- turnover in a key position, market changes, etc.). It could be weeks, or even months, before you get back to your idea, and there is a good chance that you won't remember everything that lead up to the creation of your action plan.

You may be faced with a situation where decisions were made based on conversations, meetings, and opinions that were not captured. This leaves you with a number of questions about why you did what you did.

However, if you used discussion forums to develop and refine your idea, you would have a complete record of every reason for how you arrived with your conclusions. From there, you can revisit any point that you need to, or start up the full conversation again. You would save hours of discussions and meetings- and you would make sure you don't miss any critical points.

Sometimes, capturing the process is just as valuable as the result.

Wikis in the Classroom

August 10, 2008

We recently read a blog post that outlines some great ways that educational institutions can use an Enterprise Wiki. The post describes 50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom, and has a lot of great use cases that are pertinent to many classrooms of all levels of education.

There are a number of ideas that meet the needs of corporations and business teams as well. Organizing ideas, group authoring, creating a glossary, and developing an FAQ library are all great examples of how any organization can benefit from a wiki.

One other point not to be overlooked is that there are 50 items in this list- and there could be many more. One of the strengths of wikis is that they are so flexible, and having a flexible wiki within a complete enterprise web collaboration solution provides you with a way to enhance every part of your organization.

Collaboration 101 - Wikis, Blogs and Forums

August 2, 2008

We recently added Discussion Forums to our Enterprise Wiki product, and we began to get requests in our demos for an explanation of when to use which collaboration tool. So, we wanted to share our take on how each of these valuable collaboration features could be used effectively in an organization.

WIKIS - Wikis are used primarily to capture knowledge and information. Wikis are intended to be living repositories that can be contributed to by everyone, which provides a more complete, accurate, and relevant view of key knowledge. Even though a wiki page should never be considered "complete" (changes happen all the time), they are meant to capture information that can be referenced for longer periods of time. In addition to knowledge management, shared content editing, notification, status reports, data collection, and project management are all excellent uses of a wiki.

BLOGS - Blogs are a great way to broadcast news or get quick feedback. Unlike wiki pages, blog posts are usually very time-sensitive, so they have less relevance as time passes. An example is that someone creates a blog post to comment on an article they found online. If that post was made a year ago and was about the soaring sales of Sport Utility Vehicles, that would have very little relevance today. There is interesting perspective to be found in historical blog posts, however. If someone brings up an idea that was shot down 2 years ago because of the feedback in blog comments, you can go back and see what the reasons were.

FORUMS - Forums organize complex conversations and help you make decisions. Email is terrible for complex conversations. How many times have you gotten an email blast that asks you to comment on 5 different bullet points- only to try to follow the responses from everyone else. And then having the main conversation breaks off into several side conversations- only a few of which you might care about. Forums solve that by following a trial of thought about each point in the discussion. Than, at the end of the conversation, you have a great resource to make decisions that you can be confident in- since everyone can participate and give their perspective.

We do believe that every team, department, and organization is different- so we encourage you to find as many ways to enhance collaboration as you possibly can. If you have specific questions about how to use these tools to improve your organization, just let us know!