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.