March 24, 2009

Using a wiki as a company intranet: Part 1

Posted in Small Business Advice, Using Software Tools at 3:19 pm by ecpowers

A wiki has a number of business applications. One that I have developed for companies and have found impressive is as a knowledge base or intranet for company knowledge. I have used pbwiki for this purpose, but other free and low cost wiki tools are available.

All too often a small business’s internal knowledge is, for the most part, locked up in key employees. Even in an ideal world these employees cannot be expected to remain with the firm forever. Small businesses lack the promotion opportunities to keep employees indefinitely as they grow in their careers. In these cases, “up or out” will often translate to “out” when the company cannot support multiple high-level directors.

Their knowledge of company operations, processes, and policies, as well as customers and competitors must be formally documented so it can be transferred to new employees. This documentation reduces the pain of employee turnover when it must happen by reducing the amount of time that the old must train the new. Furthermore, if an employee must leave suddenly, the job of training a replacement may fall to the CEO or owner who is in danger of falling out of touch with the level of institutional knowledge required of the position without such documentation. Certainly, not everything can be captured on paper and documented, and it does take skill on the part of the new employee to translate written information into behavior. That skill is still required, but past experience with similar processes may not be required if they can be documented.

For a busy small business there will never seem to be enough time to create a multi-page, multi-folder knowledge base. Looking at the project as one huge document that must be written will be daunting and there is a danger of never getting started.

This is the wrong way to think of such a knowledge base. The creation and development of the knowledge base is a process that must be fully integrated with the normal business operation of the company, using a few minutes here and a few minutes there every day by every employee who holds institutional knowledge. The knowledge base is never “completed” because it is a living document which grows, expands, and changes along with the business.

I’ve outlined below six steps for a CEO implementing this system:

1. Company-wide Buy-In. Establish buy-in within your firm with all employees as to what the wiki will achieve. Explain the benefits each employee will achieve and your top-level commitment to creating it. Besides being a helpful resource for the employees, they must understand that it will become a way of doing business that will eventually free them up to be sources of skill for the company rather than sources of knowledge for each other. Seek every possible means to establish voluntary buy-in with the employees before resorting to enforcement by directives and requirements. Keep this option in your back pocket, but if buy-in is not forthcoming remind employees that you are the boss and this is the way the company must move.

2. The Basic Structure. With the input of employees, establish a basic structure for the wiki’s folders. Each business may be different, but I suggest considering folders for each of these seven business systems: Sales & Marketing, Operations & Logistics, Legal & Compliance, People/Human Resources, Innovation, Financial Stewardship, and Executive Leadership. If you consider closely, I think you will find that any piece of knowledge will fall into one of these 7 categories.

3. The Individual Pages. With the input of employees, list the pages that would fall within the folders. These should include company policies, process descriptions, and collections of research. Links to external sites and uploaded files can be included as well.

4. Assignments and Schedule. Again, with the input of the responsible employees, establish a lead writer for each page or folder and a completion schedule for when basic information should be entered. Allow this to stretch over months if necessary to ease the work burden. By devoting a few hours a week to writing, the wiki will come together very fast.

5. Collaborating and Commenting. Using the wiki’s comment features, other employees and the CEO can add comments to pages highlighting where information may be lacking or where there are differences in opinion. The lead writer can use those comments to continue the work on that page. Alternately, other employees can simply add to or edit the text directly if they have needed information that the lead writer does not and the commenting process is found to be too circuitous. Establish protocols for how this collaboration will work early on so that no one feel their toes are being stepped on and all keep in perspective the end goal of simple, complete, and accurate documentation.

6. Growing Organically. When the basic information entry is complete and even before, adding and editing the information should become part of the normal business day. When one employee answers a question for another about a policy or process it should occur to them to add that data to the wiki. Eventually, when employees ask each other for this type of information, the answer will be “it’s in the wiki”. To build the employee behavior of looking at the wiki as the first source of information, employees must train each other. They will come to understand that this answer is not to be curt or unhelpful, but because using the wiki to search for information (as the document’s titles and text are fully searchable with tools like pbwiki) will become faster than asking each other and a more efficient use of labor as it will use the time of one and not two employees, and reduce the need to interrupt one another. Only after doing such a search and coming up empty should employees ask their colleagues.

Many other great benefits exist from a wiki knowledge base:

- Accountability: With directions on processes fully documented, employees can be held more accountable for understanding and following these directions. Their managers are relieved of some responsibility of intensive direct training and can work as auditors and developers of the process going forward.

- Organization of Information: Office memos by email no longer have to be kept in Outlook folders marked “Important”. The policy and process changes of such memos become part of the wiki, shared by all in their most recent version and visible to all the required parties.

- Selectivity of Sharing: Separate folders can be created for pages which vendors or consultants will be examining or contributing to. Their access can be restricted to just those folders, allowing proprietary knowledge in other areas to remain secure.

- Remote hosting: When the wiki is hosted by a vendor there is not a concern about maintaining a server for it. Furthermore, it will be accessible from internet connections anywhere allowing employees to work from home or client sites with the same access.

- Knowing where to search rather than knowing the info: With higher-level employees, clients value large bodies of knowledge. When working with newer employees it is more important to clients and customers that the employee knows WHERE to find answers to all their questions. The wiki is a huge brain backing up each employee, allowing them to learn at their own pace and not have to memorize large amounts of information before they are ready to work with a client directly.

- Defining your policies/processes: Beyond merely making the information shared and available, the process of documenting will bring to light where employees and managers have differing perspectives and opinions. While policies exist in the air, but not on paper, employees may be on different tracks about even fundamental objectives and protocols. The wiki creation process will out these differences and generate conversations which lead to resolution and moving forward.

- New employee training as coaching/teaching to search: New employee training, after wiki creation, becomes teaching how to search for and find information (and eventually how to add to the wiki directly) rather than teaching the information directly. Trainees can keep wiki pages open on their desktops to support their work as they undertake new tasks for the first few times until they are learned. The written directions for tasks can be amplified and reinforced by the trainer, but there is no longer the need for the trainer to describe tasks in full detail or for the trainee to take meticulous notes. It is all in the wiki, and both trainee and trainer can use the time saved to practice and develop skills.

- Employee manual is no longer simply a top-down creation: The wiki creation uses both top-down and bottom-up methods. The CEO and managers will benefit from the line-level experience of the employees, while the employees will benefit from the strategic understanding of the managers.

- Let customers find it themselves: By establishing part of the wiki, or a separate wiki, as a client extranet, a select group of customers or clients can be given access to FAQs constantly updated by staff. No longer is there the constraint of having the webmaster enter this information onto the website as it can be entered by each employee directly. As search is built-in, clients can easily find the answers to many pupular questions before taking up employee time.

In coming entries I will further detail some key considerations about characteristics of a successful wiki knowledge base. As always, I welcome feedback.

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