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by David Longworth - Thursday, 6th September 2007

This is the page

We’re a knowledge-based firm with a lot of experience delivering IT products and services to government organisations.

That makes knowledge sharing important.

We first started using a wiki in 2005 when we realised a lot of information was held in people’s heads with no logical place to store it – like tips for developers or the customer support teams.

We could have stored them in conventional files in our project folders, but when you move on to the next project, the team won’t necessarily know where they are.

And we didn’t want a formal knowledge management system.

The wiki was a better option because it’s a free, easy-to-use website, sitting on a modest-sized server within our corporate network that any of our staff can update.

We use a site from www.mediawiki.org, but there are lots of different suppliers out there.

It was really simple to set up, probably less than five minutes clicking through some options, and has cost us very little. We did some work customising it and have branded it as a Quicksilva site.

One of the best things about a wiki is that it’s a completely free format. You can type things on there and structure it as you see fit.

So navigation- wise, there are many different ways of finding the same article.

You can follow links or you can search for it it’s up to you. But it’s one of those things that only works if people use it.

In the 18 months we’ve had it, our staff have created 11,000 pages of information and we’ve had more than 10,000 hits – so with 25 of our 40 staff using it, they’ve accessed it, on average, 400 times each.

It’s almost been self-incentivising. If you’re a developer and someone’s constantly asking you how to do something, it’s great if you can just refer them to a wiki.

But there have also been times where we’ve actively encouraged people to use it.

For example, where we’re conscious that someone has a pool of expertise, as part of their quarterly reviews we’ll target them with adding things to the wiki.

Or if I see a leave request and find out that person is the only one who knows about something, I’ll ensure they’ve put the information onto the wiki before they go.

It gives you comfort that when people are away, there aren’t going to be any knowledge gaps.

It’s now often the first point of call for our support team when they need help answering a customer’s question. Before they go and ask an engineer, they’ll type a free search into the wiki to see if there’s a link they can look at.

And as for our developers, it’s great for things like work guidelines, the process we go through every time we build a product. There’s a checklist now of the things you have to do in line with our quality system.

We won’t be giving customers access to it at the moment. For one thing, it is not written with external people in mind.

The thing about the wiki is the ease with which you can get content up there, because there isn’t a review step or any mediation. But we might think about extending it to customers in future.

There’s a big difference between open wikis that anyone can access on the web and what we have.

We require people to log in and provide a password so you know who has made any changes – if someone were to put something malicious up there, we’d be able to find out who it was.

It also means there’s a complete history for every page, so I can look at it and see what was on it 12 months ago, who’s made what changes and when.

Quicksilva has always been open and creative, but now everyone is up for sharing their knowledge.

Tags: quicksilva, knowledge management system, wiki, knowledge sharing, technology in business, gareth butt, business advice,