- A permanently uniform level of knowledge for all employees
- Changes to earlier versions of a procedural document can be directly recalled
- Information can be targeted and found in the system using categories and keywords
- Content can be easily processed by the editorial team
- CD-compliant look and feel of the wiki means greater acceptance among employees
Process-oriented Knowledge management - a wiki as company handbook
The quality of service processes heavily depends on standards and agreements on which they were furnished. In a fast growing company it is no easy task to keep everyone up to speed on all there is to know.
The task: How can a consistently high service quality be ensured? For a company among the top 10 residential property managers in Germany a critical competitive advantage. And quality means fulfilling certain measurable criteria. This goal can only be achieved if all employees know the criteria and all work procedures are clearly delineated. A solution was needed to make documented knowledge uniformly available at the various company locations and so to provide the employees with access to a constantly updated company handbook.
The solution: The needs analysis found that the printed procedural handbook used up to that point had reached its limits of effectiveness. Several different versions were in company circulation at a given time. Even the digitalisation of the documents and their placement on the company's file server improved nothing. After an in-depth evaluation of various knowledge management solutions, the team of Ingo Rau, Iris Rabener and Jürgen Neumann ultimately decided on implementing Confluence - a wiki that for similar purposes has been employed globally by renowned companies and organisations such as Nike, BMW and Stanford University.
Critical to the decision was a solution that was both flexibile and easy to implement. Process descriptions, work procedures, job descriptions and much more could quickly be entered into the system. By using templates and cascading style sheets (CSS), the look and feel of the documents could be centrally controlled and corresponded to the corporate design of the company. Especially important for the editorial team was that the grouping of the documents into categories and subfolders can be altered at any time. The result: nothing remained to inhibit the growth of the knowledge database.
After implementing the system uncertainty as to whether procedural instructions are up to date belong to the past. Using Internet browsers the employees can now access the current version of various documents through the Intranet. Changes to earlier versions are automatically saved by the system and can be recalled at any time.