Enterprise wiki and blog example use cases

Enterprise wiki and blogging software can be used to solve an extremely wide range of collaboration, knowledge management and communication challenges within an organisation. They’re so flexible, though, that it can be difficult to know where to start.

We’ve put together a few practical examples based on our client work, which are designed to help you out if you’re looking to introduce or extend the use of enterprise social software and concepts within your organisation.

(Note: We’re an Atlassian partner and there are mentions of the Confluence Enterprise Wiki and associated plug-ins below, but the usage examples will be of use whichever product you use)

Getting started

First off here are the three steps we recommend to clients:

1. Understand the capabilities of enterprise wiki and blogging software – It’s simple to get online accounts with most vendors to evaluate the software
2. Identify a business challenge or pain point related to collaboration, content publishing or knowledge management
3. Solve it with enterprise social software

Simple, right?

Practical wiki usage examples

Here are some help and ideas for points 2 and 3 above:

Current awareness publications

Overview: Many professional services firms (such as law, accounting and business consultancy) keep colleagues updated with developments within their practice or specialist area.

Business issues: The process for current awareness is usually ad-hoc between departments and often involves mass emails and various different document attachments. The emails often get sent to the wrong people, information is not centrally stored or archived and is difficult to search. Mass emails clog up email boxes and servers and there is no mechanism for adding commentary or additional resources which might be useful to colleagues.

Solution: Use a blogging platform to create and deliver current awareness and share the content via RSS news feeds, either direct to news readers or to your intranet. Consider adding social bookmark functionality so that colleagues can store and share their online links and related content firm-wide. Finally, ensure that content creators label articles effectively and encourage colleagues to comment on items and add their own related resources.

Benefits: Current Awareness publications become consistent across the organisation, centrally managed, easier to filter and search. Inbox clutter is reduced. The publications are more collaborative and evolve into a firm-wide knowledge base of articles, commentary and links to resources. The solution also introduces staff and fee earners to the concepts of labelling, commenting and social bookmarking. Effective post tagging enables trends to emerge over time.

Supporting field sales and support staff

Overview and issues: Staff working away from the office need access to a large range of information and resources. They also need organising and managing remotely.

Solution: The web based collaborative nature of a wiki makes it ideal for managing and collaborating with distributed colleagues.

Benefits:

• Centrally organise and manage sales literature, sales techniques and experiences
• Build client, product and competitor knowledge bases
• Use the wiki to set and manage tasks (an interesting extension for Atlassian Confluence called TaskDoc (http://www.taskdoc.com) can help)
• Manage reporting – Staff can use the relevant wiki spaces to submit reports and status information
• Enable team collaboration –Remote colleagues can collaborate with each other
• Support knowledge bases – Build searchable knowledge bases that expand with new knowledge and experience over time
• Information and updates – Keep staff up to date with the latest news, information and updates

In addition most wikis use templated page designs that can be adapted to make them respond effectively over lower bandwidth networks (such as 3G) and via mobile devices.

Collaborative document creation and cross-department projects

Overview: There are many scenarios where a team needs to come together to collaborate for a client, an internal project or a sales bid.

Solution: The collaborative editing and management features of a wiki can make it an ideal solution.

Benefits:

Using a wiki can provide your teams with a much more effective way of working. As an example, a sales team working collaboratively on a bid can use a wiki project workspace to:

• Manage and discuss customer intelligence and potential competitor bidsStore the ITT documents
• Collaborate on the bid document itself
• Gain and manage project/bid feedback
• Manage task assignments, timescales and milestones (TaskDoc for confluence can help)
• Share links to relevant resources

If you’re using Confluence it’s also possible to pull customer intelligence from SalesForce.com via a commercial plug-in from CustomWare

Once the project has been completed a project review team can assess the knowledge gained from the bid and store it for later use.

Managing knowledge bases for support, product information and manuals

Overview: In most organisations there’s a need to provide easy access to knowledge bases for everything from using the phone system to solving software support issues.

Solution: A wiki is an ideal way to build and manage knowledge bases that enable interaction and extension over time.

Business benefits:

• Effective knowledge bases enable staff, partners and customers to serve themselves
• Wikis can easily be updated with new issues, resolutions and knowledge
• Effective labelling enables related information and common issue patterns to emerge
• For support teams a wiki can be a great way of accessing technical knowledge bases, documentation and product downloads remotely when onsite with a client
• The wiki can also be used to build documentation over time (I know that in an ideal world this shouldn’t happen but let’s face it – It does)

Note: Many of the examples above can also be amended to suit collaboration scenarios with suppliers and partners.

Final tips for encouraging buy-in from the business

Avoid using jargon – If you’re selling these concepts to the business (which you probably will be) it can be worthwhile avoiding the terms blog, wiki, enterprise social software and enterprise 2.0. Just concentrate on current challenges, solutions and benefits to the business.

Avoid using the term ‘social’ – Although I always think of the word social in terms of a social business culture that fosters collaboration and engagement, it’s worth noting many people instantly think of ‘socialising’ (or Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc) which generally has a negative impact.

Further reading

If you’re interested in reading more then these resources should be useful:

8 things you can do with an enterprise wiki: http://www.ikiw.org/2009/08/21/8-things-you-can-do-with-an-enterprise-wiki/
A Collection of 50+ Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies and Examples: http://www.jmorganmarketing.com/collection-enterprise-2-0-case-studies-examples/

If you have any further ideas or examples please feel free to comment.