Enterprise Collaboration Blog | BrainKeeper

A Perfect Example of Why Management Should Trust Their Staff

2008-11-20T13:29:21Z

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?

2008-11-17T20:07:18Z

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

2008-10-27T02:29:57Z

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

2008-10-17T20:37:16Z

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

2008-09-22T14:55:35Z

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

2008-09-16T21:02:11Z

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

2008-08-26T03:11:16Z

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

2008-08-14T15:59:39Z

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

2008-08-11T02:35:11Z

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

2008-08-03T04:37:16Z

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!

Avoid the "Expert Driven" Pitfall

2008-06-13T04:50:23Z

While our last few posts have focused on ways to encourage team members to use and contribute to your Wiki, there are also pitfalls to watch out for that may hinder Wiki adoption. One thing to watch out for is your Wiki evolving into an "expert driven" Wiki.

When this happens, people feel like they can/should only create and edit information about which they are an expert. While there are many issues with this type of Wiki, the two main problems are: the lack of new information being added, and the alienation of users who feel that they are not an expert (or enough of an expert) regarding the information covered in your Wiki.

Adding New Information
This issue goes hand in hand with our Something is Better than Nothing post. If users feel they must be an expert to add information into your Wiki, then content will be rarely added. While incorrect information is certainly not desirable, incomplete information should be considered okay, since this will encourage other wiki contributors to add to it, thus enhancing the scope of the knowledge covered in your Wiki. It is obvious that most of the time, people feel like they know enough to contribute to a subject much more often than they feel like they are an expert on a subject.

Non-Expert Alienation
If your Wiki turns into an "expert driven" Wiki, you also run the risk of completely alienating those users who feel they are not an expert on any topic covered in your Wiki. Since they do not think they should add to any existing content, usually they will not add any new subjects to the Wiki either. At this point, you run the risk of those users completely abandoning the Wiki, and if this happens your Wiki will begin to get out of date and useless.

To avoid the "expert driven" wiki trap, encourage users to add new information and update existing information, even though they do not know everything about the subject. The more this happens, the more complete your Wiki will become.

What's In It For Me?

2008-05-29T16:59:46Z

On occasion, while we are helping a new customer roll out their new BrainKeeper Enterprise Wiki, one of our client's employees will ask the question, "What's in it for me?". It might not be asked quite this directly, but ultimately, this is the question that they are asking.

The initial response is always the same: It depends on what you put into it.

Since wikis are social in nature, those who actively participate in creating, editing and improving the content are the ones who get the most reward. Ultimately, you will be seen as an expert in the subject areas where you contribute most, allowing other team members to develop trust and a reliance on your expertise. This also has the added benefit of raising your perceived (and actual) value within the organization, since everyone is able to clearly identify what you are knowledgeable about- and you are willing to share that knowledge with everyone in the company.

In addition to these social and professional rewards, there are also personal rewards that go along with actively participating in a Wiki. For example, satisfying your natural instinct to make things better when you contribute to existing knowledge or the satisfaction of creating and maintaining information that you really care about will give you a sense of personal satisfaction. These natural tendencies are part of the reason why Wikipedia thrives, and will play a part in the success of the Wiki within your organization.

This is not to say that passive users, those who simply use the wiki to answer questions or find information, get nothing. In fact, they get a great deal out of the Wiki too. For example: getting answers to questions without having to wait for an emailed response, or the ability to determine who is an expert on specific subjects, are both great ways for information consumers to get value out of your Wiki.

So, instead of asking what you are going to get out of it, simply make a conscious effort to help others through the wiki- and they will help you.

Help Make Something Better

2008-05-16T03:21:24Z

While simply getting information into your Wiki is crucially important to your success (see Something is Better than Nothing), ensuring that things are developed and improved upon is just as critical. Having tons of Wiki pages that are in some stage of incompleteness can mean that you don't have 100% of the information you need to answer a key question or get something done.

If you see something that is lacking additional information or context that you can contribute to- add to it. Again, even if you do not know everything about the subject or topic, you probably know something that will help make the existing information more complete. It is rare to find one person that knows everything about a subject, but if you get 5 people with knowledge of a topic to collaborate on the same Wiki page or section, chances are you will end up with a treasure trove of information. The true strength of a Wiki comes from the total combined knowledge of every contributor.

We have found that this is also one of the best ways to get new users to become comfortable with the idea of using Wiki Software. Adding bits of knowledge to 10 wiki pages can be more valuable than creating a brand new Wiki page- and often, these bits of knowledge are exactly what people are looking for. One sentence could mean the difference between getting an answer in 5 minutes instead of the half hour to track someone down (who might not even have the right answer!).

As someone with a vested interest in making your Wiki as complete as possible, you should do everything you can to encourage the other users of your Wiki to help improve existing Wiki pages, as this can go a long way towards keeping information current, up to date and accurate.

Something is Better than Nothing

2008-05-09T03:22:39Z

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.

Custom Dashboards: Much More than a Starting Point for your Wiki

2008-05-03T03:12:23Z

We recently released an enhancement to BrainKeeper that allows subscribers to customize their Dashboard (learn more about Custom Dashboards and our Wiki Software here). We have received more positive feedback from this enhancement than we have for any of the ones we have done in the past, which really emphasized two key reasons why organizations decide to use a wiki:

1. People want to know what is new, and what is relevant to them.

This is one of the best uses of a wiki, and is one of the driving forces behind our development of BrainKeeper. It doesn't do much good to have a tool for capturing information if you don't give people a way to separate the "nice to know" from the "need to know". This is the reason why so many people are frustrated with their email: everything comes into the same Inbox, so everything must be read to determine if it was actually worth reading- not the best way to spend your day.

By taking the few seconds to customize your Dashboard, you will be able to trust that everything you need to know will be ready and waiting for you. And even better, with a wiki, collaborating on that information is only two clicks away. Which brings us to the next reason why people appreciate the Custom Dashboard:

2. Everyone accomplishes tasks in a different way, so the closer you can match your Dashboard to your tasks, the sooner they will be completed.

Whether you are an active wiki contributor or someone who is looking for quick answers to questions, you can setup your Dashboard to get you one step closer to accomplishing what you need to do. Many organizations are to the point where they are measuring productivity gains in minutes instead of hours, and having a well layed-out Dashboard can give you quite a boost.

By giving some quick thought to the things that you do with your wiki most often, you can make sure those actions are available as front-and-center as possible. Also, hiding the things that are unimportant to you can be just as valuable- the less 'noise' there is, the easier it will be to focus on what you need to do.

If you aren't a subscriber, or have not yet seen our Custom Dashboard, we invite you to take a look with a free trial. Information that matters has never been so easy to find.