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:

1. 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.
   
2. 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!
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.
   
5. 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.

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.

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.

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!

We got some interesting insights from one of our subscribers that we thought would be valuable to help your Wiki gain momentum. Our subscriber found that some people were reluctant to add new wiki pages if they didn't have a "complete" page- meaning that they didn't have all of the information that others would need. This line of thinking was preventing valuable insights from getting into the wiki. The solution is easy enough to identify: users should be encouraged to create new pages even if they will be incomplete. It is usually easy to convince people to understand that once information is in your Wiki, other users will improve upon it.

You could actually make the case that it is more important to know what topics, documents, and ideas should be captured in the wiki- and less important to have them completely outlined when you first submit them to the wiki. People, because of human nature, are much more likely to improve what is already there than they are to start something from scratch. When you think about this, this really does make sense. If you come across something that you know is inaccurate, not quite right or lacking some details, it is almost a natural instinct to improve upon it.

So, the next time you think something needs to be put in your Wiki but you don't know 100% of what needs to be there, just put in what you know and allow others to improve upon it. If you know there are certain people who can make it better, let them know and ask them to take a look. Starting this evolution process and bringing other people into the mix on a regular basis will dramatically improve both the amount and quality of the information in your Wiki.

Quite often, we work with potential and existing clients who have recognized that they need a better way to collaborate- and have chosen an enterprise wiki as the solution.  We obviously believe that implementing an enterprise wiki is a key factor in improving collaboration for organizations, but the full answer is more than just deciding to subscribe.

Wikis are indeed becoming more mainstream, but too many people consider a wiki to be a system that sustains itself immediately after it is rolled out.  The "if you build it, they will come" mentality can work (and actually has worked for a few of our subscribers, believe it or not), but this is the exception- not the rule.  It is more likely that you will need a strategy for how to use your wiki- and to make sure that strategy is communicated and reinforced in as many ways as possible.  Here are five keys to executing your wiki collaboration strategy:

1.  Make Sure a Wiki is the Right Tool

Before you get too far, make sure that the need you have can be completely addressed with a wiki.  This is where a month-to-month subscription can be very beneficial.  Try it out for 30 days with a small group of people who will take the time to use the wiki and give you honest information about whether it will work for you or not.  Also, don't be afraid to use your enterprise wiki support and sales staff.  If the are experts at the same level as the BrainKeeper Customer Support team, they will be able to give you a great deal of good information about how to use your wiki for a particular task.

2.  Find a Champion and / or Key Stakeholders

A sense of ownership is one of the most powerful motivating factors in the corporate world.  Give one person, or a small group, the responsibility to make sure that the wiki is being used- and used properly!  By having respected personnel buy into the wiki, you will have advocates that become mentors.  Also, make sure that you reward the heaviest contributors, which might mean adding them to the group that manages the wiki.

3.  Start Small

To ensure that everyone understands what the wiki should be used for, start off with a Workspace that contains content which many people can relate to.  Many people will quickly see the value of the wiki and understand how it will be used in your organization.  By starting small, you can manage it closely, you get a quick success story, and you have a great foundation to build from.

4.  Constant Feedback

Consistently ask about how things are going with the wiki.  If people like it, find out why so that you can spread the information to other people.  If people don't like it, find out why.  You, or a BrainKeeper Customer Support representative, may be able to solve it quickly.  Make sure to get feedback early and often!

5.  Learn From Experience and Adapt Your Strategy Accordingly

Not every aspect of every point from above will apply to everyone.  But this one does apply: whatever strategy you start with will change.  You need to be able to recognize when things aren't working, and modify how you use your wiki.  Your wiki will grow organically, so the policies that govern its use will have to do the same.  Preparing everyone for this ahead of time will be very helpful when it comes time to make those changes.

For more help on developing your wiki collaboration strategy, the experts who work with the BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki are more than happy to talk to you.  Let us know if you are interested.